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LIBERTY 
AND DEMOCRACY 

AND OTHER ESSAYS 
IN WAR-TIME 

BY 

HARTLEY BURR ALEXANDER, Ph.D. 

Professor of Philosophy in the 
University of Nebraska 




BOSTON 

MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 

MDCCCXVIII 



^ 

'J^^ 






Copyright, 1918 

By Marshall Jones Company 

All Rights Reserved 



Printed in the United States of America 



il.1 



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)C!.A494794 



TO THE MEMORY OF 

GEORGE SHERMAN ALEXANDER 

WHO TAUGHT HIS SONS THAT THE 

WATCHFULNESS OF THE CITIZEN IS 

THE SALVATION OF THE STATE 



PREFACE 

► A LL human thinking is temporary and 
r\ experimental, Hke the life of which it 
is a part. But in time of war, and of 
such a war as this that now wracks the world, 
the temporal perils of thought swell to new 
measures. Our emotions are intense; familiar 
things take on discolouratlons, while strange 
orders of fact breed strangely new percep- 
tions, making easy the inroads of fantasy 
and suspicion; and even the mind con- 
sciously in search of a truth that is eternal 
finds itself hypnotically in bond to the garish 
actualities of the present. Nevertheless, there 
are no times when hard thinking is more the 
need." Such intelligence as we have is meant 
(if meant for anything) to be of service under 
stress; and that citizen and that student 
who fails to respond with his clearest effort 
betrays at once his country and the best part 
of human nature, — namely, its quest of 
rational guidance. 

The essays which form the present volume 
represent but one man's endeavour to dis- 
cover the light of reason in a period of tre- 
mendous stress. They were written, from 
time to time, under the impulse of events, 
and for contemporary reading. They cannot, 
therefore, pretend to either system or con- 
secution, and they undoubtedly contain repe- 



PREFACE 

titions, not only as between the several essays, 
but of matters that have been frequently and 
better expressed elsewhere. Yet with all this, 
the author believes that the urgency of 
thought is such that every citizen who prizes 
his citizenship should publicly and repeatedly 
express the best that is in him; and he hopes 
that in the collection here offered there will 
be found something that may be of real, even 
if temporary, value in clarifying the problems 
of principle which beset society. 

Problems of principle, — for if there Is one 
conviction that underlies this book, and may 
perhaps give it unity of thought as well as of 
intent, it is that the wisdom of political con- 
duct is proportionate to the clarity with which 
political principles are defined and the con- 
stancy with which they are held in view. To 
those who find no value in general principles 
the effort here expended will appear vain; 
but for those who hold with the author that 
general principles must be the first rules of all 
telling practice, no such effort can seem en- 
tirely useless. True, there is here no con- 
structive, no reconstructive programme. But 
the hour calls for diagnosis: we have under- 
stood neither our constitution, as a state, nor 
our maladies, as a society; and not until we 
achieve these understandings, through analy- 
sis of symptoms, can we hope to provide an 
effective cure. That the physician must have 
health in his mind when he studies disease 
was a rule of Greek medicine; and it is in the 

vi 



PREFACE 

spirit of this rule that the diagnoses here sug- 
gested are made. 

But while a programme of reconstruction 
is yet to make, it may be worth a word here 
to define the line which the author's thinking 
repeatedly brings him to believe such re- 
construction must follow. This is the educa- 
tional, — not in any narrow scholastic way, 
but broadly, touching the whole life of the 
citizen and the whole endeavour of the state. 
Democracy can only flourish where the citi- 
zens are both intelligent and alert, intelligent 
as to the purposes of their society and alert 
as to the means of attaining these: unceasing 
vigilance is the preserver of freedom, but this 
must be accompanied by a no less unceasing 
consideration of the ends of human life if the 
liberty is to be worth preserving. "He who 
would duly enquire about the best form of 
the state ought first to determine which is the 
most eligible life." Aristotle's aphorism is 
the core of political wisdom; and its applied 
meaning can only be that the citizen who is a 
true warden of his rights must be an athlete 
of the mind, forever trained and in training. 
The problem of due training is the problem 
of political self-preservation. 

The several essays are here reprinted (in 
a few cases with slight modifications) from 
their original publication in The International 
Journal of Ethics, The Journal of Philosophy, 
Psychology and Scientific Methods, The North 
American Review, The New Republic, The 



PREFACE 

Dial, The Hibbert Journal, and, in the case of 
the assembled "Letters to the Public," from 
the columns of The Nebraska State Journal. 
In view of the current character and impulse 
of most of the articles, the author has deemed 
it advisable to give for each the date of its 
composition. 

February i, iqi8. 



nil 



CONTENTS 

I. Liberty and Democracy ... i 

II. The Fear of Machines ... 28 

III. Rousseau and Political Humani- 

TARIANISM 48 

IV. Trial by Combat and the Tribunal 

of God ..... 02 

V. Justice and Progress . . . 113 

VI. Americanism 124 

VII. The Limits of Tolerance . . 134 

VIII. Essential Liberty .... 143 

IX. America's Self-Revelation . . 151 

X. Letters to the Public . . . 177 



He who would duly enquire about the 
best form of a state ought first to deter- 
mine which is the most eligible life. 

— Aristotle y Politics y vii, i. 



LIBERTY AND 
DEMOCRACY 



IN the presence of death — if the dead 
be not too near and precious — all men 
become for the moment philosophical. 
There is, in the stillness and calm of the life- 
bereft body, released forever from the im- 
patient and relentless activity of man's estate, 
a something which commands in our mood 
the imitation of its image; and we, the living, 
instinctively withdraw from the sounding 
world about us and enter into the hushed and 
solemn courts that hold our dead. In a very 
deep sense Socrates was right when he defined 
philosophy as a love of death, and the phil- 
osopher's pursuit as a practice of dying, — 
of which no proof is more simple than the 
power which death itself possesses of bringing 
upon men the mood and desire of philosophy. 
As is the dead body of a man a presence 
that commands philosophy, so, in its greater 
degree, is the dead thought and desire of 
nations and centuries. Most of all is this true 
when we are suddenly and helplessly brought 
face to face with the blight and prostration 
of ideals which we have been taught to believe 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

are the very bloom of life and the treasure of 
existence. Man's ideals are the most intensely 
human of his possessions, and their destruc- 
tion is the most cataclysmic of tragedies. 
From the wreck of a perished dream all nature 
must move to salvage the soul, for which, in 
its first weakness, there is none other save 
the sour medicine of philosophy. 

To-day we are in the presence of such a 
corpse of thought. I can think of no death in 
history quite so stupendously bitter as is that 
which has stricken down the gorgeous human- 
itarian optimism of the nineteenth century. 
Backed by the material display of modern 
life, which blinded us to the inner flimsiness 
of our faith, this optimism took possession 
of the modern world with a thoroughness 
which was the more complete because not 
subjected to reflective criticism. Socially, in- 
tellectually, and morally we had centred our 
worship in man to a degree unexampled in 
history; our pride in our own nature was 
overweening, — and its fall is cataclysmic. 
To-day we stand aghast before the broken 
idol of the humanitarians, — that ritualized 
Man of the West Europeans in whom it was 
believed that reason and science and love of 
peace and love of his fellows must irresistibly 
bear onward to a compelling felicity. To-day, 
mid the bitterness of bloodshed and the sweat 
of human agony, we see the Colossus fallen; 
and sharpest of all the cries that war has 
raised, piercing the roar of battle like a thin 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

scream of death, comes the lamentation of 
Europe for the lost idol and the ruined shrine. 
It is not the burned manuscripts of Louvain, 
the shattered sculptures of Reims, nor yet the 
welter of blood-soaked flesh in her sodden 
fields, that have most unchangeably painted 
Europe with horror of the German; but it 
is the loss of that faith in man, which the 
humanitarian romanticism of nearly two cen- 
turies had made into the image of her spir- 
itual desire, that has envenomed her soul 
against the image-breakers. The Germany 
that men hate is the Germany that would 
assert the might of man as against the rights 
of man, that would put the rule of blood and 
iron in the place of liberty, equality, and fra- 
ternity, and that would elevate the Ueber- 
mensch above humanity. Doubtless the hu- 
manitarian faith was phantasmal and insub- 
stantial, — the event has so proved it. Possi- 
bly the Germans themselves regard their 
Realpolitik as but the continuation of the 
philosophic tradition of disillusionment: like 
Xenophanes they would remind us that the 
gods of the Ethiopians are snub-nosed and 
swart, of the Thracians blue-eyed and red- 
haired, and that if oxen had gods their gods 
would be oxen. But the phantoms that leave 
men's souls, in the hour of their departure 
go forth with a great cry — "Pan is dead! 
Great Pan is dead ! " — and the hurt that 
they leave behind is like the hurt of broken 
love. 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

Europe today is fighting over the body of 
her dead hopes, her dead ideals. She is struck 
too nearly and too deeply to be able to per- 
ceive that the life is departed from her beloved, 
that only the dead form remains. For her 
the hour of realization, and hence the hour of 
philosophy, is not yet come: she is not re- 
signed to the inevitable separation; she can- 
not, therefore, reflect upon it. With us in 
America the case is not quite the same. It 
is true that we have shared the European 
ideal, the humanitarian idolatry of man; it 
is true, also, that we feel a vague horror for 
the broken idol. But with us the disillusion- 
ment is not wrought amid scenes of material 
havoc; the curse of war is not directly upon 
us; and so we are in a position to begin to feel 
already that decent detachment in the scene 
of sorrow which belongs, not to the intimately 
afflicted, but to those for whom the presence 
of death may be the gateway to philosophy. 
We are sufliciently recovered from the shock 
to begin to be able to think, — and God 
knows that we have need of thought. 

For the war in Europe has brought us 
problems such as we have never faced in our 
national life — and I do not except the issue 
of slavery, — upon our solution of which, as 
I believe, depends our continued existence as 
one of the nations of this earth. For a cen- 
tury and a quarter we have nourished our 
democracy upon certain ideals born direct 
from that European humanitarianism which 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

now lies dead, — the ideals of liberty and law 
and justice, which we have made the corner- 
stone of our Constitution. We have accepted 
these ideals as coloured by the easy optimism 
of the eighteenth century; we have recounted 
them with much enthusiasm and with little 
reflection. But unless we go on to define 
them in a new sense which will give them a 
resurrection and a life renewed, they will fall 
with the failure of the spirit which gave them 
form. Our democracy, if it is not to vanish 
utterly, must restate and revivify the articles 
of its faith, in a form suiting the change which 
has come over the life of mankind, and in a 
spirit which shall be different from the old, 
both in the greater humility and the greater 
courage which it will require. For such a task 
only the philosophic mood of quiet and reso- 
lute reflection is competent. To such a task 
the philosophic mind of America will surely 
rise, inspired by the yet unconquered idealism 
through which this continent was peopled. 

II 

The United States of America came into 
national existence as the result of a war for 
independence. It was not an accident of 
territory or race or language or religion that 
converted the thirteen Colonies of the Crown 
into a federal state; it was a political ideal. 
This fact, more than any other, has appealed 
to the imagination of Americans, and has 

5 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

moulded in them their conception of the mean- 
ing of their own polity. " We hold these truths 
to be self-evident," reads our Declaration, 
*'that all men are created equal; that they 
are endowed by their Creator with certain 
unalienable rights; that among these are 
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." 
It is on the strength of these postulates that 
the Declaration goes on to affirm that "these 
United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, 
free and independent states." 

It is obvious that the conception that gives 
inotive to this language is the conception of 
liberty. Equality and the pursuit of happi- 
ness are incidents in the definition of liberty : 
equality is a vague conception of the social 
boundaries of liberty; the pursuit of happi- 
ness is an equally vague estimate of the mean- 
ing of liberty for individuals; but the central 
and moving idea of the Declaration is that of 
liberty itself. Liberty it is that, in the con- 
ception of the fathers of our country, consti- 
tutes the fountain and tide of all political 
rights; and liberty it is that, in our own day, 
has^ seemed to Americans the very genius of 
their national institutions. 

But the history of human conduct shows 
nothing more certainly than that an idea 
may be both moving and powerful without 
being either clear or consistent. The history 
of American political idealism is but an added 
illustration of this. From the beginning we 
have been greatly stirred by the symbols of 

6 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

liberty, but we have given little thought to its 
essence. Certain elements, to be sure, stand 
out with eminence, yet none of them go to the 
marrow of the conception, even as it affects 
our practice. On the one hand, liberty has 
come to mean for us an exaggerated indi- 
vidualism, — the pursuit of happiness carried 
to the extreme of do-as-you-please and mind- 
your-own-business. The Jeff ersonian aphorism, 
"that government is best which governs 
least," is the typical expression of this notion 
in political philosophy. On the other hand, 
liberty has been assumed to imply a social 
equality of citizen with citizen which all 
human organization is strenuous to deny. 
What we call our democracy is the current 
expression of this notion, socially represented 
by our willingness to 'mix', as we say. Its 
noblest verbal embodiment is the great deter- 
mination of Lincoln "that we here highly 
resolve that government of the people, for the 
people, and by the people shall not perish 
from the earth." 

The ambiguity of our thinking is reflected 
in our turbid history. I know of no more 
spectacular example of the blindness with 
which an idea can sere men's minds to fact 
than in our own political career has issued 
from the assertion that ' all men are born free 
and equal.' This, which seemed self-evident 
truth to our fathers, seems self-evident false- 
hood to us. Yet a great war, the War of the 
Rebellion, was fought in the terrific effort to 



LIBERTY A^D DEMOCRACY 

steep this lie into the blood of Nature. North 
and South alike, in that war, fought in the 
name of liberty; yet neither understood the 
thing. The liberty for which the North con- 
tended was the social liberty represented by a 
fictitious human equality; the liberty for 
which the South fought was the freedom to 
realize equally fictitious individual rights. 

In less spectacular, though perhaps not less 
momentous ways, the same see-saw is appar- 
ent in our economic and social life. From the 
'squatter sovereign' to the 'plutocrat', from 
the boy bully to the flamboyant lechers of 
affinity unions, we are loud in our proclama- 
tions of individual independence. On the 
other hand, no people more hoarsely vocif- 
erates vox populi, vox Dei, or more piously 
cants that the public sentiment is the wisdom 
of God. None of these fancies could endure, 
I am certain, were it not for the conviction, 
less conscious than determined, that some- 
how the essence of liberty is interbound with 
them. We cannot forget that we are a nation 
founded in the faith of freedom, and it is to 
that faith that we will be true to the cost of 
every sanity. 

No one, I think, can comprehend American 
history without some feeling for the force 
with which the symbol of liberty appeals to 
the American mind; but it would be a rash 
man who should assert that in America, 
liberty, in any intelligible and definable form, 
has ever been realized. Indeed, the observer 

8 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

of our history might well sympathize with 
the aphorism of a shrewd student of the his- 
tory of Florence: "The Florentines had in a 
very marked degree the sentiment of liberty 
but the sentiment is often in inverse propor- 
tion to the possibility." And for our own 
democracy, surely the thinking man will 
share something of the bitter contempt which 
Plato felt for the democracy of Athens, — "a 
charming form of government, full of variety 
and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality 
to equals and unequals alike." 

Democracies have their own special forms 
of tyranny, not the least rancorous of which 
is the tyranny of a public sentiment called to 
support a liberty which the public does not 
comprehend. In the recently published report 
of the Committee on Academic Freedom to 
the American Association of University Pro- 
fessors occurs the following significant judg- 
ment: "Public opinion is at once the chief 
safeguard of a democracy, and the chief 
menace to the real liberty of the individual. 
It almost seems as if the danger of despotism 
cannot be wholly averted under any form of 
government. In a political autocracy there 
is no effective public opinion, and all are sub- 
ject to the tyranny of the ruler; in a democ- 
racy there is political freedom, but there is 
likely to be a tyranny of public opinion." 

If educated Americans so diagnose their 
own state, it is not surprising that foreigners 
coming from states governed by totally dif- 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

ferent conceptions should be profoundly and 
disagreeably impressed by our servitude to 
the vox populi, — by that justice of demo- 
cratic states which is, says Aristotle, governed 
by a numerical, not by a qualitative principle. 
In a current pamphlet, Nordamerika und 
Deutschla7id, the famous historian, Eduard 
Meyer, says: "The cultivated German, from 
the moment when he lands on the quay of 
New York until he leaves it again, feels him- 
self under an unwonted sense of oppression, 
the yoke of 'public opinion,' which is exer- 
cised not only by the press, but also through 
all the forms of social life. His behaviour, 
his utterances are all controlled and dragged 
into publicity; he has no freedom of move- 
ment nor of opinion; it is surely the greatest 
problem of 'the land of contrasts' that the 
Americans regard themselves as a free people." 
It is in no spirit of self-depreciation, but with 
real solicitude, that we should study such 
criticisms as these, asking ourselves whether 
indeed our vaunted freedom may not be the 
illusory thing which to Meyer it appears to be. 

Ill 

It is the common opinion of men, says 
Aristotle, that the basis of the democratic 
state is liberty, and that liberty can only be 
enjoyed in democracies. 

This judgment — true, doubtless, of the 
average Hellene of Aristotle's day — can 

lO 



LIBERTY A^D DEMOCRACY 

hardly be regarded as universal to-day. Cer- 
tainly the expression just quoted from Eduard 
Meyer implies that in America essential 
liberty is absent. We know well that the Im- 
perial German states of to-day are not democ- 
racies, and yet that they consider themselves 
free, — free in a truer sense than that in 
which we are free. In an inquiry into the 
nature of liberty it behooves us to ask for the 
precise meaning which the Germans attach 
to liberty, especially when that meaning is 
so obviously contradistinguished from the 
meaning of liberty as understood by demo- 
crats, ancient and modern. 

In the pamphlet above cited Meyer says 
that the German and the Anglo-Saxon have 
diametrically opposite conceptions of freedom 
and of the state. Now it is from the difference 
in the conception of the state that the diflPerent 
conceptions of freedom follow. If, therefore, 
we would understand the German conception 
of freedom, we must get it through an under- 
standing of the German conception of the 
state. 

This is no simple idea. The oft-quoted 
phrase of Treitschke, "der Staat ist Macht, " 
is only one of its interpretations, and by no 
means a clear one; for while Treitschke, no 
doubt, has political power chiefly in his eye, 
his is but one focalization out of many possible 
focalizations of a much more comprehensive 
philosophical idea. 

I refer to Hegel's notion that the state is one 
II 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

living mind, — not figuratively, but literally, 
one living mind, the necessary and rational 
expression of nationality. It would be alto- 
gether false to Hegel's genius to identify this 
mind which is the state with the 'collective 
mind' of the French sociologists, much less 
with the 'public sentiment' and 'popular 
sovereignty' of American phrase. The mind 
which Hegel has in view is a definitely organ- 
ized and logically articulate expression of 
reason, having a metaphysical unity of its 
own, as real, if not as comprehensive, as is the 
unity of the universe. The state is the rational 
expression of the nation, whose individual 
citizens it should rule as our human reason 
should rule our lesser faculties. From another 
point of view — the cosmic view — the state 
is an expression of the universal mind of the 
Absolute; it is a unity within the greater 
unity of the universe, comprising within itself 
the lesser units which are its citizens. All of 
these — universe, state, citizen — are essen- 
tially spiritual entities; but as the broader 
unities are the more spiritual, the state is a 
more spiritual thing than is the man whose 
civic being enters into it, and who is, there- 
fore, in every sense a less worthy object than 
is the state. 

In such a system as this, where the reason 
of every citizen is subordinate to the reason of 
the state, where is liberty to be found? 
Hegel's answer, and the answer of Germany, 
which has been drawn from Hegel, is simple. 

12 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

Liberty is never private; liberty is always 
public and collective. "The universal is 
bound up with the full freedom of the par- 
ticular," is Hegel's phrase, the only meaning 
of which must be that there is no freedom for 
the will of the individual save in its concord 
with the will of the state. Indeed, the essential 
quality of individuality, as we democrats 
conceive it, disappears altogether: the great 
man, the man of genius and apparent indi- 
viduality is, in Hegel's view, but "the mouth- 
piece and executor of his age," — the more or 
less conscious voice and instrument of the 
national mind. 

This, in my opinion, is the essential and 
by all odds the most respectable form of the 
Germanic philosophy of the state. It is 
echoed, in varying intonation, by many suc- 
ceeding writers. The Nietzschean and 
Treitschkean and Bernhardian effusions but 
represent the decline of this conception from 
that of a state mind whose rule is the rule of 
reason, to that of a state mind whose rule is 
the rule of appetite and force. The thing is 
more decently expressed by better thinkers. 
Hugo Muensterberg puts it: "In the German 
view the state is not for the individuals, but 
the individuals for the state. The ideal state 
unit which has existence only in the belief of 
the individuals is felt as higher and more im- 
portant than those chance personalities which 
enter into it." And again: "The Anglo- 
Saxon system is controlled by the belief in the 

13 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

individual as such, and the Teutonic ideals 
are bound by the belief in the overindividual 
soul." In the same vein and with the same 
intention Professor Meyer tells us that the 
German state is "a living thing, set on high 
above all individuals." 

It is obvious that the German conception 
of the state thus sketched is in reality as dia- 
metrically opposed to the conception of the 
state held by Americans, and with them by 
Frenchmen and Englishmen, as Professors 
Meyer and Muensterberg say it is. It is ob- 
vious, too, that the German notion of liberty, 
flowing from the German notion of the state, 
is to the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon no liberty 
at all. We cannot say of a man who can ex- 
ercise his will and reason only when they are 
in accord with a more authoritative will and 
reason, that he is a free man; we cannot 
regard that citizen whose highest activity is 
as mouthpiece or tool of the state, as a free 
citizen. 

But if freedom, in our sense, is foreign to 
German political ideals, may there not be 
compensation in other qualities which we 
miss, — if, indeed, our freedom is in itself 
desirable? Few will deny, I imagine, that 
there is, in some degree, such compensating 
virtue. Undoubtedly its expression is that 
* efficiency' which all nations to-day unite in 
envying the German. Efficiency in execution 

14 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

is the direct correlative of unity of purpose 
and simplicity of ends; and unity of purpose 
and simplicity of ends are exactly what a 
state of the German type is adapted to secure. 
The basis of such a state is not liberty (as 
Aristotle would have it for democratic states) 
but loyalty, — the great virtue of feudalism. 
The institution of feudalism was Germany's 
first gift to European civilization. After the 
breakdown of the Roman Empire, the Ger- 
manic tribes which were Rome's destroyers 
reorganized Western Europe on the basis of 
feudal law; and the key to that law is the 
loyalty of vassal to suzerain. A man's security, 
in the feudal system, lay in being some other 
man's man, and in being true to that other 
man; personal dependence, not personal in- 
dependence, is the structural principle. There 
is no direct relation of the individual to the 
law, as in the Roman system, but only of the 
individual to the higher individual, up to the 
sovereign, who is himself supported, as is the 
capstone of an arch, by the hierarchical edifice 
to which he gives solidity. In Germany, 
France, and England, and even in Italy, this 
feudal law became the dominant feature of 
mediseval states. It was broken in Italy by 
the Renaissance democracies, in England by 
the Magna Carta, in France by the Revolu- 
tion; but it remains to this day the outstand- 
ing feature, of the polity of those imperial 
German states from whose remote founders 
it first issued. Indeed, I am inclined to think 

IS 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

that the nub of what Western Europe calls 
Prussian militarism is feudalism pure and 
simple. And Hegel, in his conception of a 
hierarchical universe, of which the hierarchical 
state is only a lesser image and division, is, I 
believe, but speaking in philosophical terms 
the political meaning of German feudalism. 

Clearly, in such a state equality and the 
liberty which is associated with equality have 
no place. Its political principle is self-sur- 
render, inequality, and its virtue is loyalty 
to a superior. There may be a kind of humani- 
tarianism involved in the conception, the 
faith of the man in his master, but there is an 
utter destruction of that West European 
humanitarianism based on equality before 
the law and the faith of man in man. 

This, however, is not a condemnation of 
philosophical feudalism, if I may so term the 
German view; it is merely a definition of its 
difference from our own view. Surely we can 
never condemn such a polity if it be true, as so 
stout a Ghibelline as Dante affirmed and so 
stanch a Ghibelline as Kaiser Wilhelm II 
vociferates, that the Empire is the visible ex- 
pression of God's will on earth. Dante's 
noblest verse is that in which he sums up the 
spiritual unity of a feudal universe, — E la 
sua volontate e nostra pace, — and I suppose 
that it could be only Satanic rebels who would 
care or dare to oppose the will of a divinely 
inspired Empire. The one question which 
remains, if we accept, as many do, the feudal 

t6 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

conception of the cosmopolis, is as to the 
authenticity of the German inspiration, — or, 
to put it into more contemporary terms, the 
righteous superiority of German Kultur. 

IV 

On this question even men who accept the 
Hegelian philosophy and acknowledge the 
supremacy of loyalty over liberty as the civic 
virtue hold divergent views. But it is hardly 
a matter worth arguing. For it seems obvious 
that if you believe that God is the omnipotent 
suzerain of the universe, the event of Ger- 
many's victory or defeat will prove whether 
the Kaiser is indeed the Lord's most eminent 
feudatory, — for, \ as again Dante points out, 
trial by combat is the last determinant of 
justice in a feudal world: might is, as our 
German instructors have informed us, the 
proof of right, and military conquest a divine 
vindication of superiority. 

But my philosophy is opposed to this, and 
I would argue against the whole view, irre- 
spective of Germany's merits, of her successes 
or of her defeats. For the real question, as I 
see it, is not whether German culture is the 
culture providentially designed for all man- 
kind, nor whether Germany is the providential 
instrument for its dissemination, but it is 
whether or not the German conception of the 
universe, and hence of polity, is true. I cannot 
believe that it is true. 

17 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

In the first place I do not believe that the 
universe is exclusively mental and spiritual; 
I think that it is in part material, and that 
this materiality is an essential condition of 
whatever spirituality it may possess. That 
is to say, my philosophy is dualistic, or, as I 
should prefer to say, Platonic. Let us take 
the issue at its crux, — the conditions of 
reason. Of all our mental and spiritual powers, 
reason is the most obviously mental and 
spiritual; and yet the whole exercise of reason 
is dependent upon the existence of material, 
or irrational, factors and situations into which 
reason introduces its own peculiar kind of 
order. To put the matter simply, reason acts 
through judgments. A judgment is always a 
decision between possible alternates, — the 
rational and the irrational consequences of a 
situation. Without judgment, without choice, 
we could have no reason; and this means that 
the existence of reason is directly conditioned 
by the existence of the irrational, — • which is 
Plato's and my conception of the material. 
It means further that rational choice is always 
a free choice, and indeed that the essence of 
freedom is the power to make a rational 
choice.^ 

'I say this in full consciousness of the phrase 'rational necessity,' — 
a phrase which is wholly unfortunate in so far as it has been made 
the support of a theory of logical bondage. For rational determinism 
is in no sense analogous to physical or mechanical determinism: it is, 
in fact, an opposite quality. Rational necessity is fundamentally 
only respect for truth; it is a valuation of true judgments or decisions 
in preference to false judgments and decisions, and it is determination 
with respect to this valuation. If there were no alternatives involved, 

l8 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

It is to the great credit of Dante and the 
mediaevaUsts that they recognized this truth. 
For them freedom was no matter of libertine 
impulse; it was the gift of reason. "Free 
choice is free judgment in matters of will," is 
Dante's phrase, and this freedom of judgment 
he regarded as the greatest gift conferred by 
God upon the human race. The difficulty of 
the mediaeval view, — a difficulty which was 
never solved, — is the reconciliation of bona 
fide choice with thoroughgoing foreordination. 

If what has just been said about the funda- 
mental condition of reason be true, its impli- 
cations with reference to states are not far to 
seek. Reason consists in free choice as be- 
tween real alternatives; the existence of 
reason, therefore, rests upon the existence of 
conflicting possibilities. Reason within ^ a 
state • — no more than reason in human affairs 
generally — cannot exist except among a 
citizenship endowed with the power of free 
choice; an utterly 'efficient' state can be 
neither rational nor free; the first condition 
of a reign of reason is a reign of freedom. _ 

This is the first point in regard to political 
reason: that it can only exist in states whose 
citizens are free. But there is a second char- 
acteristic of almost equal pertinency to the 

the word 'necessity' would itself be meaningless (as essentially it is 
when applied to mechanical situations, which are without alternative 
outcomes until restated in ideal terms). Reason, therefore, is funda- 
mentally based upon free choice in a situation presenting real alter- 
natives; or, otherwise put, the essence of true freedom is rational 
choice, which is rational determinism. 

19 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

times. This is the essential detachment of 
reason. Reason is conditioned by a material 
situation, but it is not itself material. It is 
essentially a condition of withdrawal from the 
material and the physical. We ' stop to think, ' 
as we say; and the whole art of rational living 
is the cultivation of the power to withdraw 
from action for the sake of thinking. The main 
portion of our active life is a social life; but 
reason is mainly anti-social, individual, in 
character. It is a notorious fact that men 
reason least when their activities are most 
collective; the responsibilities of reason are 
far more with the closet scholar than with the 
orator of the forum; even generals are bomb- 
proofed when they plan their battles. Men 
act most efficiently for the accomplishment 
of determined ends when they act in groups, 
but they think most eifectively when they 
think in severalty. The history of civilization, 
with its Plato, Archimedes, Galileo, Coper- 
nicus, and the rest, is loud in this asseveration. 
The den may have and does have its fallacies, 
but they are fallacies of logic, not of tempera- 
ment, as are those of the forum and the ros- 
trum. 

The truth is that a state in which the will 
and desire to act is controlled by collectivist 
purpose, and not by free choice, is only an 
organized — and hence an especially dan- 
gerous — mob. The mob mind, no matter 
how complexly organized, is inferior to the 
individual mind, than which it is infinitely 

20 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

less rational. The excellencies of mind (as 
history shows) develop in detachment from 
affairs, in the acquisition of what we call 
mental perspective, and not in social absorp- 
tion. Individual detachment no less than 
individual liberty is requisite to all realization 
of ideal values. 

If reason possesses the characteristics which 
I have assigned to it, — free judgment and 
detachment from action, i. e., liberty and in- 
dividualism, — it follows inevitably that 
reason must be sought not in coUectivistic 
states, but in democratical states, where 
liberty and individualism are prized. It 
follows, too, that such a metaphysical entity 
as the "overindividual state" of Professor 
Muensterberg or the "living being set high 
above individuals" of Professor Meyer is a 
rational monstrosity; and I cannot but feel 
that it is just this monstrosity which drives 
the non-Teutonic world to its present horror 
of the German state machine. There is in this 
machine's hugely brutal operation something 
at once fascinating and terrible, and, as with 
all terrible fascinations, something inhuman. 
To call it superhuman is quite in the Ger- 
manic vogue, but to men reared in the 
humanitarian school there is nothing com- 
plimentary in the epithet: the Uebermensch 
can never be less than unlovely and ogreish. 

Prussian militarism is not, in my view, a 
thing of arms and munitions; it is a point of 
view. A while back I said that it is a modern 

21 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

expression of mediaeval feudalism. I will now 
add that it is feudalism despiritualized and 
imbruted by the superposition of a conception 
of the state in which true reason and hence 
true humanity have no part. No one, I trust, 
will regard this condemnation of a theory of 
the state as a condemnation of the German 
people nor even entirely of the German state; 
for no state, whether autocracy or democracy, 
is perfect of its type; and this is obviously 
true of Germany, which contains many ele- 
ments of democracy, wherein, as I believe, 
are to be found the sources of the true great- 
ness of the German people. But the essential 
character of an "overindividual state" and 
an "overindividual national mind" seems to 
me, both in its conception and in its present 
fruits, nothing short of damnable. 

V 

In this criticism of the anti-democratical 
state I have tried to lay the foundations for a 
proper estimate of what should constitute the 
true democracy, — not such a democracy as 
we have in our United States of to-day, to the 
flaws and weaknesses of which no man is more 
willing to confess than am I, but such a democ- 
racy as we would have our state to be, 
could we reconstruct it according to the true 
principles of rational liberty. 

It is a fact we cannot blink that historically 
democracies have been short-lived. Their 

22 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

equilibrium is unstable and likely to be 
ephemeral. This follows, inevitably perhaps, 
from the slothfulness of human nature; men 
do not cherish the responsibilities of thought, 
especially of rational thinking. It is much 
easier to act under command than to com- 
mand, much easier to act than to think; the 
herd follows the leader because this is the 
path of least psychical resistance, and the 
ever-pressing peril of democracies is the will- 
ingness of the citizenry to become a led herd, 
to degenerate into an undisciplined mob. To 
many minds such an undisciplined mob is a 
more revolting spectacle than is the mechani- 
cally organized mob-soul of the autocratic 
state, and the bad democracy seems to be the 
worst of states. But here I am inclined to 
stand with Plato to the extent, at least, of 
maintaining that of all evil states the evil 
democracy is the least evil, and for the very 
reason that it is the least efficient. 

But what of the good democracy? Plato 
regarded it as the least good of good states, 
but on this I must part company with the 
ancient. I am willing enough to concede that 
the good democracy is less efficient than the 
good autocracy or oligarchy; but efficiency 
I cannot regard as the measure of goodness. 
Efficiency means only instrumentality; it is 
an agency, not an end; and in political insti- 
tutions it happens to be an instrument whose 
perfection defeats the proper ends of demo- 
cratic states, as we see too often in our own 

23 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

*well oiled' politics. The proper ends of 
democracy are that law and justice which 
express the liberty of reason. These are not 
expressions of perfection, but of imperfection; 
they are not the products of concord, but of 
conflict; and their continued existence is 
dependent upon the continuation of the 
conflicts of which they are the partial, but 
never complete, harmonizations. 

To put it quite shortly, justice, which repre- 
sents the exercise of reason, and law, which 
represents a body of rational judgments, are 
both definable only in terms of irreconcilable 
conflicts. And democracies, which depend 
for their existence upon the exercise of reason 
by the individual citizens, are only possible 
where some degree of strife, some internal 
discord, prevails. I make no doubt but that 
this is what was in the background of Lincoln's 
mind when he said, "It has long been a grave 
question whether any government not too 
strong for the liberties of its people, can be 
strong enough to maintain its existence in 
great emergencies." History is not reassuring 
on this point, for the democracies of Athens 
and Rome and Florence were all too fleeting 
and it would be arrogance and senselessness 
for us to assume any necessary superiority 
of rational resourcefulness over the men of 
these great cities. 

How then shall we save our state and its 
ideals? Is a truly democratic liberty possible? 
Organization for material interests is essential 

24 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

to human society; yet organization of ideal 
interests is ruinous. Can we maintain the one 
and avoid the other? It is through ideaUty 
that we create, and if there is any primary 
right of man it is surely the right of the indi- 
vidual to create, — to be something more than 
the voice and mouthpiece of others. 

If a mean is to be found anywhere between 
the material necessity for collective action 
and the ideal necessity for individual thought, 
it will be found, I conceive, by way of the 
clearer conception of law and justice. In one 
of the most brilliant pamphlets which the 
war has called forth. The War and Religion, 
Alfred Loisy says: "What mankind yearns 
for in our time is an ideal of healthy freedom 
and real justice. It desires that force shall be 
utilized no longer to create laws, but that 
law shall regulate the use of force." Law, in 
the state, is the equivalent of self-control in 
the individual; justice is the equivalent of 
the restraint of reason and the love of truth. 
Liberty, which with the Greeks we must define 
as a mean between license and slavery, can 
exist only in states where the individual in- 
telligences are eternally alert; hence, where 
there are real problems, involving real issues 
and real frictions of man with man. Liberty 
is the delicate equilibrium of life, and like all 
life it is a state of individual souls. The 
moment individuals are subjected to col- 
lectivist ideals, the state becomes mechanical 
and monstrous; on the other hand, the mo- 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

ment law and justice become uncritically 
institutionalized, the democracy becomes 
decadent. 

In Justinian's Digest there is a definition of 
justice, quoted from Ulpian, which to my 
mind goes to the very heart of true state- 
craft: Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas 
jus suum cuique tribuendi. Justice is a 'con- 
stant and perpetual wiW; justice is an un- 
failing hold upon the mental powers of 
thought and determination, an eternal alert- 
ness of the reason. It could not be better put; 
and I would only add to Ulpian's qualifica- 
tion that this eternally vigilant will should be 
directed not only to 'rendering to each his 
due,' but to defending in and for each his 
right. 

I have stated my reasons for believing that 
this will, which is the essence of justice and 
hence of the liberty of states, is possible of 
cultivation only in democracies. But I have 
not sjiown that it is long possible there; nor 
am I sure that it is so. In the United States 
to-day I seem to see a petty efficiency prized 
over liberty, party loyalty over justice, sub- 
servience to mob expression over the exercise 
of individual reason. These, I believe, are 
symptoms of a deep and biting disease. And 
for its cure I can conceive no other agency 
than the personal inspiration of personal 
thought, that inspiration for which Socrates 
so greatly stood in the days of Pericles. Mor- 
dantly ironical, pitilessly just, indifferent to 

26 



LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

all save truth, Socrates allowed no weakness 
of sentiment or frailty of feeling to withstay 
his probing. He spared none save the intel- 
lectually dead. Hither and thither he went, 
stinging the lethargic souls of men, and leav- 
ing them to writhe with their problems. It 
was the ruin of the narrow efficiency of ty- 
rants, but it was the salvation of that liberty 
of the reason which is the fountain of all 
liberty. The Athenian democracy put Soc- 
rates to death, — yes, but it was a death which 
was the suicide of the democracy, while for 
Socrates it was only the gateway to the city 
of truth. 

March, igi6. 



27 



THE FEAR OF 
MACHINES 



THERE are few traits of human nature 
more curious than is our awe of human 
nature itself. In the mode of attraction 
this awe becomes veneration, sometimes 
ideaHstic, sometimes superstitious. IdeaHstic 
is the veneration of hero, sage, and saint, 
whose high humanity seems to us a trans- 
figuration wrought by some superhuman 
grace. Superstitious is our quaint creduKty 
in the wisdom of emotions and intuitions, 
and above all in the sacrosanct sagacity of 
tides of public sentiment — the divine voice 
of the people. ' Soul, ' we say, is manifested in 
these things, — 'soul,' a hidden treasure, not 
well understood, be it the perquisite of a 
private temperament or sacramentally shared 
by a mob. In this mode of attraction our awe 
becomes a veneration, which may descend 
to superstition; in the opposite mode of repul- 
sion this same awe of our nature and its 
manifestations begins with suspicion and 
mounts to superstitious terror. The suspicion 
is directed to the unresolved motives with 

28 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

which we credit men, for we deem that there 
is a subterranean level of impulse beneath 
human conduct, to which reason gives only 
a specious surfacing; and, as with all dark 
vulcanic forces, we fear it. The terror is most 
shown in the presence of those great material 
and social agencies which form the outward 
bodiments of our inward desires, and in hor- 
rific mode image the soul's hid lineaments in 
soulless machines. In all nature there is noth- 
ing more brutal than is human device, and 
on the face of nature is no scar so black as 
those inflicted by the hand of man. And yet 
the thing need not be: it is but a crude self- 
fear that perpetuates the shudder. 



I 



Idiocy is the most horrible of monstrosities 
— reasonless instinct bearing the mask of 
man. The like vacant mentality in the scaly 
saurian moves us only to curiosity or con- 
tempt; it is as a parody of humanity that 
idiocy becomes frightful. Doubtless this is 
in part due to the fact that the human parody 
conjures up to us those saurian instincts, 
sleeping within our own souls, of which we are 
all squeamishly aware, — sleeping, but with 
a restless and uncertain sleep which only the 
perpetual commands of a vigilant intelligence 
can keep them from breaking: for the brutish 
ghost of unreason, buried deep in our being, 

29 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

Is never securely laid. Its emergence in what 
we call the 'mob soul' seems to us a bestial 
thing; but when it comes forth in the apparel 
of reason — as now and again it does, both in 
individuals and in nations, — then it inspires 
in us the horror which besets all idiocy. 

It is this same quality which makes our 
own created machines seem frightful. A 
machine has all the device of rational pur- 
pose, and none of its soul. In the parsi- 
monious constriction of its elements and in 
their relentless application to determined 
motions, the machine is the very image of 
efficiency, — governed, deadly, predestinarian. 
But it is an efficiency against which nature 
cries out; it is an efficiency destitute of that 
adaptability of means and idealization of 
ends which is the humane essence of true 
reason. A theologically monstrous God ad- 
ministers a justice untempered by mercy; 
a soul made monstrous by its own miserliness 
warps life to one idea; nature without acci- 
dent is ugly, and device with no latitude of 
adaptation is hideous. The poetry of tools 
attaches to the most primitive and the most 
generalized forms, — to the smith's hammer, 
the woodman's axe, the tiller's hoe, to spindle 
and distaff, hearth and crane; the pen will 
never be replaced by the typewriter in the 
imagery of letters, nor the sword by the ma- 
chine-gun in the imagery of war. Those old- 
fashioned locomotives with polished brass 
bands, floral ornaments, and personal names, 

30 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

were far more intimately human than the 
modern Molochs of the rails, serially num- 
bered and mechanically interchangeable. 

No author has pictured the horror that is 
inherent in mere device with more vivid 
imagination than has H. G. Wells in such 
novels as The First Men in the Moon and The 
War of the Worlds. The first-named shows the 
fate of a man who here on earth is the arch 
embodiment of the 'coldly scientific reason,' 
when transported to the moon. That orb he 
finds honeycombed by a colony of ant-like 
beings, mocking man in size, but gifted in 
superhuman measure with intelligence of 
machines, so that they have reduced the whole 
lunar world to one efl[icient state, utterly 
'socialized' and utterly soulless. In the 
presence of such monstrosity the earth-born 
scientist, still feeling the tug of his humanity 
becomes insane. In this novel Wells holds 
up to deserved satire the conception of a 
mechanically organized world-polity; in The 
War of the Worlds he portrays with no less 
frank imagination the hideousness of mechani- 
cal efficiency when bent on destruction. His 
octopus-like Martians are in fact no more than 
embodied appetites provided with the narrow 
machinery of self-gratification. Until the 
present War, when Germany has displayed 
to the world their hateful likeness, such 
possible antagonists seemed indeed as remote 
as Mars. The striking difference in the two 
struggles, the fictive and the real, is that 

31 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

whereas Wells depicted human heroism as 
futile when thrown into contest with machine- 
endowed appetite, the War in Europe reads 
a different value into human heroism. 

In material engines, things of wheels and 
levers, we see the exteriorization of one dis- 
tortion of our natures, — undeviating applica- 
tion of all force to one determined end, which 
eliminates both the need for judgment and 
its exercise, and hence eliminates individual 
will. In our social machines, — all the care- 
fully organized device of politics, industry, 
and war, — we see a similar exteriorization of 
distorted humanity, similarly precluding the 
general exercise of reason, enforcing intoler- 
ance, and destroying liberty. Publicly we 
have long felt a fear of such social machines, 
without any clear understanding of their im- 
port. In politics our distrust of party organi- 
zations, bosses, and professionalism, is such a 
fear; in industry it is reflected in our antip- 
athy to irresponsible unions and 'soulless' 
corporations, and again in our wistful harking 
back to the day of the likable jack-of-all- 
trades and to the poetry of handicrafts; in 
the matter of war it is present in our abjection 
before what we call 'militarism.' We vaguely 
realize the need of such social machines; we 
helplessly employ them; but all the time we 
regard them with animosity and assail them 
with abuse. If at times we concede a timorous 
admiration to their 'efflciency,' this is only to 
point the evil of their misapplied power. 

32 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

Especially since Germany has reared for us 
the specter of an organized mob, a reasonless 
appetite guided by reasonless ambition, have 
we become obsessed with panic, — now mani- 
fested in a clamorous demand that we sur- 
render our reason and liberty in the building 
of a machine that will enable us to gratify 
our own meaner appetites, now in a weakling 
plea that we bury our heads in the sands, a 
trembling invitation to destruction, until 
the storm pass. 

Both of these policies are contemptible 
surrenders to contemptible fears. There are 
facts that must be faced. Among them, first 
and inexorable, is the fact that human ma- 
chines, social and physical, are growing in 
complexity with the increase in the numbers 
of men, as well as with the natural complexifi- 
cation of human wants. Primitivism is as 
natural to the mind burdened with the prob- 
lems of civilization as is Utopianism; but it is 
even more visionary to dream of a return of an 
Arcadian past than to hope for a Millennial 
future. Democrats from Aristotle to Rousesau 
have framed as their ideal polity a small state, 
secluded in its prospects, moderate in its de- 
mands; yet both Aristotle and Rousseau lived 
on the eve of huge experiments in empire. 
Tacitus, amid the artifice of Caesar's court, 
idealized the simple virtues of the German; 
while the whole mind of the artificial eighteenth 
century sought philosophic relief in its fantasy 
of the 'natural man.' But such dreamings 

33 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

are mere simps for a jaded taste. The forward- 
facing man knows that human artifice must 
not and cannot be wrecked. Even were it 
desirable, there is possible no 'back to nature'; 
on the contrary, every coming year must in- 
evitably see mankind laying a more unhesi- 
tating and a more commanding hand upon 
Earth's body, until all her five continents 
and all her seven seas are bounded in his 
polity. 

The future is not in the hands of those who 
fear human organization. But is it to be in 
the hands of men who command or of men 
who are commanded by the organizing ma- 
chines? This is the radical question, and on 
its solution turns the way of our world, — 
whether it is to become an arena of free and 
rational endeavour or a circus given over to 
painted shows and the glutting of beastly 
appetites. There is no manner of doubt that 
the apparatus of organization is dangerous to 
the very intelligence that creates it; that in 
complicating the instrument we obscure the 
end; and that there is an unceasing peril lest 
we be blinded by our own device and snared 
by our own inventions. Hoist with their own 
petard, Americans are drowned by sub- 
marines of American contrivance; while the 
irony of the goosestep is that it is self-imposed. 
There are monarchs puppeted from birth, 
statesmen become the fools of their own diplo- 
macies, soldiers who are but the mechanic 
slaves of the art of war, — all no better than 

34 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

the Siegesallee's nail-studded block in the 
image of Hindenberg;^ but assuredly all no 
worse than are those pastes and casts of man- 
liness which, in democracies, are blocked and 
reblocked to suit the raw greeds of political 
parties. It is no part of wisdom to deny the 
danger created by the machine, or that there 
is peril to its makers in social device. It may 
well be that the danger besets democracy 
even more than other forms of government: 
for democracy is, by its nature, nearer than 
are other forms to easy surrender to the sway 
of the reasonless mob. The ends which guide 
democratic societies are necessarily complex; 
indeed, complexity of end is just what makes 

^African colonies bulk large in the War's controversies, and the 
place in the sun which Germany demands is mostly in the tropical 
sun. But is there no Nemesis in empire and has Germany got only 
good and learned no evil from her black colonies? To me, at least, 
the Hindenburg colossus is a grisly sign. The West Africans have a 
type of fetish called Fetish-into-which-Nails-are-Driven. The making 
of a fetish of this sort is a matter of tribal importance (I cite Den- 
nett). "A palaver is held, and it is there decided whose kulu [soul] it 
is that is to enter into the Muamba tree and preside over the fetish 
to be made. Aboy of great spirit, or else, above all, a great and daring 
hunter is chosen. Then they go into the bush and call his name. The 
Nganga priest cuts down the tree, and blood is said to gush forth. 
A fowl is killed and its blood is mingled with the blood that thev say 
comes from the tree. The named one then dies, certainly within ten 
days. His life has been sacrificed for what the Zinganga consider 
the welfare of the people. They say that the named one never fails to 
die. .... People pass before these fetishes calling on them to kill 
them if they do, or have done, such and such a thing. Others go to 
them and insist upon their killing so and so, who has done or is about 
to do some fearful injury. And as they swear or make their demand, a 
nail is driven into the fetish, and the palaver is settled so far as they 
are concerned. The kulu of the man whose life was sacrificed upon 
the cutting of the tree sees to the rest." Has not Germany immured 
the soul of humanity in her nail-studded idols.'' Africa capta ferum 
victorem cepit ! 

35 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

them democratic, — "full of variety and dis- 
order," as Plato ironically puts ^ it. Oligar- 
chical states, on the other hand, have rela- 
tively simple ends, reflecting the fewer wills 
which define public purposes; and this sim- 
plicity of end makes easy not only that effi- 
ciency of self-seeking which we profess so to 
admire, but it also enables such states to 
keep in view their purposes with a directness 
which is impossible to the complex and disor- 
derly democracy. Imperial Russia could follow 
the policy of a Peter for centuries, whereas 
America must blunder bloodily into the 
nationalism its institutions assume. Reason 
is assuredly put to a harder trial by the tumult 
of the Forum than by the devils of the Den. 

But shall we therefore yield us to our fears .f" 
Legions have destroyed the Caesar who created 
them, and the armies of republics have im- 
perialized consuls. Arms forged for protection 
have been perverted to conquest, and fed- 
erations for defense into empires of oppression. 
But must we for this abjure the right of free- 
men to maintain their liberty.? 

Militarism is not an embodiment in arsenals 
and armies; militarism is a surrender of the 
passion for righteousness to the panoply of 
war, and for a nation which can keep that 
passion strong and pure arsenals and armies 
present no peril. Those who cringe at the 
thought of the nation in arms are but visibly 
expressing their own moral weakness and 
their want of faith in the possibility of a just 

36 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

democracy. There is peril in a loaded gun; 
there may also be safety: in last analysis, it is 
the alertness of the controlling intelligence 
that decides. The same is true of the loco- 
motive and its engineer; and the same of 
medicine and its practitioners, of industry 
and its captains, of courts of law and their 
magistrates, of all mechanical and social 
device and its devisers. We live in a kind of 
world and in an age of the world where devices 
of all sorts are growing in complexity, where, 
therefore, the necessity for alertness and self- 
mastery in the control of device is ever more 
urgent. If we are democrats we know that 
especial perils beset us, both because of the 
confusion of our aims and because it is easier 
for the mob than for the individual to mistake 
appetite for reason, and advantage for right. 
But if we are men, we shall not be craven 
because our world happens to be dangerous; 
and remembering that our machines are of 
our own make, we shall refuse to succumb to 
superstitious terrors. 

Hunc ighur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest 
non radii soils nee lucida tela diei 
discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque. 

II 

Natures species ratioque! The cure of super- 
stitious terror is knowledge of Nature in her 
outward forms and knowledge of Nature in 
her inward reason; and this Lucretian cure 

37 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

is double because the peril of ignorance is 
double, outward and inward. The outer peril 
is that fear of mechanical things, grim mobili- 
zations of material and personnel, which give 
us so huge an impression of power. But is not 
this monstrousness and deformity of machines 
due just to the fact of their automatism, — 
to their purposelessness or to our ignorance 
of the uses to which they may be put? And 
is not this ignorance itself an ignorance of 
our own intentions, of our own purposes and 
reason, — for machines are human tools .f* The 
inward peril is more terrible than the outward, 
and it is the cause of the outward: what we see 
exteriorized in machines is human purposeless- 
ness, but purposelessness endowed with force. 
That force can act only under some direction; 
if the directing power be not foresight, it 
must be impulse and appetite, and impulse 
and appetite too often and too fearfully it is. 
Here is the deep peril of the soul. Our terror 
of things outward is due to the gloom of things 
inward — terror animi tenebrceque, — and of 
these Itwain suspicions 'tis the latter is most 
damning. 

A Washington despatch, in the days just 
succeeding the breaking of relations with 
Germany, stated that President Wilson could 
not then define what, in his opinion, would 
constitute that overt act on the part of Ger- 
many which would bring him before Congress. 
But, said the despatch, the President is cer- 
tain that when the time comes he will "feel" 

38 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

that it has come, Congress will " feel " that 
it has come, and the whole neutral world 
will "feel" that it has come. Intuition, emo- 
tion, the imperative inspiration of public 
feeling, these, rather than foresight and reason 
(so the despatch implied), were to govern the 
United States of America in a supreme crisis 
of her history. The event has proven the 
President wiser than the press, but it has 
not altered the fact of our public distrust of 
the public reason. When the citizens of a 
democratic nation are asked to repose an 
unenlightened confidence in its official leaders, 
leaving to them knowledge of the facts upon 
which national policy is to be based, and the 
option of its disclosure, this can only be 
because the self-reliance of reason is no article 
of the national faith, — because, in short, 
it has no belief in the democracy of rational 
judgment. The secret diplomacies which 
precede wars, and the political (as distin- 
guished from military) censorships which 
accompany them are the inevitable ex- 
pression of this unfaith, whose harsh cor- 
ollary is flattery of impulse and idolatry of 
appetite. 

Distrust of reason is the first descent. Be- 
yond looms an altar to the Genius Publicus, 
and the wild adulation of a sovereign mob 
running amuck beneath the pillars of the 
Forum. Choice between beasts of the arena 
and incense to Caesar is next, and beyond 
that the images of grim Pharaohs and death- 

39 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

less majesticals asserting sway over men 
as insouciant gods. The Divine Right of the 
Lord's Anointed, be he Kaiser Wilhelm II or 
the Sovereign Voice of the American People, 
is the right of unreason over reason, of super- 
stitious fear over intelligent purpose. In 
the history of political theory there are just 
two key conceptions. The one finds the source 
of sovereignty in blind and emotional ac- 
quiescences, — in belief in the holiness of 
rulerships (and even Dante was moved to 
this) ; belief in the right of the lust of power 
(which Machiavelli and Nietzsche proclaim); 
belief in the contagious benevolence of our 
natural sympathies (which is the text of 
Rousseau and the modern democrats). The 
other conception is the Greek, the Aristotelian 
conception, that the source of sovereignty 
and the authority of states is, or should be, 
reason and reason alone, and that the best 
state is that which is based upon the most 
intelligent inquiry into the purpose of human 
life. In the period of recorded history most 
states have blindly gone the blind way of 
superstition; few have followed the light of 
reason. But has this brought wisdom into 
human affairs? 

The answer is the Great War, nation after 
nation, in the glass of disaster, revealing its 
deep stupidity. Latest is America, paralyzed 
in mind, waiting for a flood of emotion to give 
it guidance, — for whatever has been the in- 
tention of our leaders, this has been the public 

40 



THF FEAR OF MACHINES 

temper. Behind us is England, blundering 
haplessly, almost grotesquely, into a struggle 
she should have foreseen and prepared for. 
France, with her initial trust in the Belgian 
buffer, Russia, massive in ignorance, Austria, 
no less massive in recklessness, — all in their 
measure show the same unintelligence: for 
they seem to have entered into the conflict 
with the notion that it was to be a game, 
played according to political rules, and 
eventuating in political defeats and victories, 
— an illusion now long dissolved in their own 
spent blood. 

But of them all none has suffered the delu- 
sion of a more colossal unintelligence than has 
Germany; none has so ghastlily grained the 
horror of unreason into the souls of men. 
The delusion is older than the War, which, 
indeed, is born of it; and it is a delusion 
doubly deceptive because veiled with the 
apparition of the reason it denies. I refer to 
that form of the divine right theory which 
Germany has made peculiarly her own, serv- 
ing as her conscious vindication of the War, 
and in no small part as its pretext. Citation 
of source is beyond necessity, since the 
apostles of the "over-individual state" and 
"the trans-individual national soul" have 
proclaimed their creed unto all ears. But it is 
worth while to point out that this mystical 
super-state, whose sacramental body is the 
transubstantiated flesh of its citizens, is not 
(as is often enough inferred) a modem replica- 

41 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

tion of the classical model. Greek and Roman 
lived and died pro patria; but in each case 
theirs was a fatherland looking directly and 
humanly to that good life of the citizen which 
their sages regarded as the end of statecraft. 
Socrates died out of fidelity to the law; and 
Vergil made law — sustaining the weak and 
abasing the arrogant — • the justification of 
Rome. Even Marcus Aurelius, Stoic of the 
Cosmopolis, announces: "My will is to my 
neighbor's as unrelated as my breath to his. 
Though we be, and in high degree, made for 
one another, yet in the inner self each has 
his own sovereign right. " The debate of the 
Athenian envoys with the Melians, on the 
verge of outrage, has been more than once 
cited as the ancient parallel to Germany's 
outrage upon Belgium; but even here there 
was no ghastly pretence of righteousness 
urged as excuse of cruelty; on the contrary, 
the Athenians employed (as William James 
remarked) a "sweet reasonableness" which 
is entirely open in its appeal to what is con- 
sciously brutal in human nature. "As for the 
gods," they said, "we expect to have quite as 
much of their favour as you: for we are not 
doing or claiming anything which goes beyond 
common opinion about divine or men's de- 
sires about human things. For of the gods we 
believe, and of men we know, that by a law 
of their nature wherever they can rule they 
will." 

The true parallel to the doctrine of the 
42 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

divine right of Kultur is the Muslim Allah ilah 
Allah! sung to the naked scimetar; or better, 
it is the benign blight spread by the pious 
Incas over Andean America. Indeed, there 
is no book which so brilliantly illuminates 
the pages of contemporary history — when 
the understanding of Germany is the prob- 
lem — as does the Royal Commentaries of 
Garcilasso. When Manco Capac received his 
commission from "Our Father, the Sun," 
the Divine One said to him: "I take care 
to go round the earth each day, that I may 
see the necessities that exist in the world, 
and supply them, as the sustainer and bene- 
factor of the heathen. I desire that you shall 
imitate this example as my children, sent to 
earth solely for the instruction and benefit 
of those men who live like beasts. And from 
this time I constitute and name you as kings 
and lords over all the tribes, that you may 
instruct them in your rational works and 
government." Naturally this large commis- 
sion from on high was given a liberal inter- 
pretation; and speedily we find Lloque 
Yupanqui, the third Inca, resolving that 
"arms and power" as well as "prayers and 
persuasion" should form an agent for the 
spread of the light. "But the natives of 
Ayaviri, " writes the chronicler, "were so 
stubborn and rebellious that neither prom- 
ises nor persuasion, nor the examples of the 
other subjugated Indians were of any avail. 
They all preferred to die defending their lib- 

43 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

erty. ... So they came forth to fight, with 
no wish to hear reason, obliging the Incas to 
arm their men rather in self-defence than for 
attack. " This was the prologue — the first 
* defensive conquest' by which the Children 
of the Sun obeyed that inner Drang which, in 
its epilogue, clamped their tyranny over civi- 
lized South America, obliterating those peo- 
ples who "had their own gods with whom 
they were at accord, desiring no other," and 
converting the valleys into cemeteries of lost 
art. 

Superstition of this type — asserting the 
inspiration of a reason that is above reason — 
is the last refinement of the barbarous soul. 
We see it in the Germany of to-day, issuing 
like a murk Jinni at the summons of the Lord 
of the Lamp, to horrify mankind. In it is no 
trace of the Greek devotion to the law of 
human nature (fair or foul) ; none of the Ro- 
man reverence for the leges regies, jus gentium, 
and mos pads, that 

totum sub leges mitteret orbem. 

Rather it embodies all the monstrosity and 
frightfulness of human instincts when recog- 
nizing no excess in their satisfaction, and of 
brutish credulity made only the more hateful 
by its assumption of the mask of rationality. 
When men pose as gods, humanity is lost. 
In a recent play (Dunsaney's The Gods of the 
Mountain) a woman pleads with the beggar 
who would be god : 

44 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

"Master, my child was bitten in the throat by a 
death-adder at noon. Spare him, master; he still 
breathes, but slowly." 

"Is he indeed your child.?" 

"He is surely my child, master.'* 

"Was it your wont to thwart him in his play, while 
he was strong and well.?" 

"I never thwarted him, master." 

"Whose child is death.?" 

"Death is the child of the gods." 

"Do you that never thwarted your child in his play 
ask this of the gods.?" 

"Master!" 

"Weep not. For all the houses that men have 
builded are the playfields of this child of the gods. " 



III 



The Greeks were the first democrats, and 
the Greeks best understood the virtues of 
democracy. Virtue, they said, is a mean be- 
tween indulgence and abnegation, — as we 
might say, between impulse and automatism, 
— and the anchorage of virtue is self-knowl- 
edge, self-control, and self-trust. Autocracies 
take away individual responsibility, sub- 
stituting the dark commands of imperious 
rulers, who sardonically hide their own mean 
appetites behind a pious countenance. But 
democracies, which grant responsibility with- 
out a corresponding appeal to reason, kindling 
indulgent impulse rather than stimulating 
the labor of thought, play with a dreadful 
fire. Irmptive and explosive passion, not the 

45 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

dry and stringent truth, guides their behaviour 
which is rather to be described as a gambling 
with human nature than as a true poHtic. 

Fortunately, as there is a mean in private 
conduct, which is private virtue, so there is a 
mean in political conduct, which is demo- 
cratic virtue. It is founded upon faith in 
human nature, but upon that part of human 
nature which is most like daylight, man's 
reason. It abjures fear of human instruments 
be they corporations or armies, because it 
understands their use and its own purposes 
in employing them. It banishes superstitious 
reverence for impulse, because it recognizes 
in intelligent will a safer guide. It owns no 
loyalty save to truth; it knows no liberty save 
in its own exercise; it champions no equality 
that is not proportionate with the good. For 
its maintenance this democratic virtue de- 
mands of the democratic citizen that he keep 
a militant vigil over his citizenship. In the 
moral world there is no laissez-faire: respon- 
sibility is relentless. Virtue, like life, is an 
equilibrium with a high center of gravity; 
and human societies, like upright human 
bodies, must preserve their precarious balance 
by unceasing effort. Nay, the truest image 
of the democratic state is that which the 
battle-field affords in the flight and contest 
of the aviators; for the salvation of democracy 
depends upon that same combination of un- 
flagging activity and alert judgment which 
makes the aviator's duty so perilous and so 

46 



THE FEAR OF MACHINES 

inspiring. As with aviators, so with democ- 
racies, destruction is swift and easy; and as 
with aviators safety is measured by the power 
of the machine and the sagacity of the train- 
ing, so in democracies there is no security 
save in strong engines guided by clear vision 
and hands trained beyond trembling. And 
back of these, and supporting all, what makes 
both aviators and citizens is belief in the 
manliness of men. 

The United States is at war, and in a just 
cause. If the even hand of justice be main- 
tained, the war, though it will surely be hard, 
will be no lasting evil. Our peril is not lest we 
shall not fight effectively. Our deeper peril 
is lest we do not think cleanly, answering the 
justice of our cause with just action, and 
purifying our judgment of others by as stern 
and true a judgment of ourselves. The Greeks 
were the first democrats, and over the shrine 
of the god of enlightenment they placed the 
word — 

FNQei 2ATT0N 



March, IQ17. 



47 



ROUSSEAU AND POLITI- 
CAL HUMANITARIANISM 



THERE is a dramatic propriety as well as a 
scholarly interest attaching to the ap- 
pearance of Vaughan's edition of The 
Political Writings of Rousseau} The work 
was published in 191 5, nearly a year after the 
outbreak of the War, which, as the editor 
tells us in his preface, came upon the eve of 
the completion of his undertaking; hamper- 
ingly with respect to one detail, for he had 
planned to devote August, 1914, to a trip to 
Cracow, there to collate his text with the 
manuscript of the Gouvernement de Pologne, 
discovery of which had been announced in 
191 2. The defect of such a detail (which some 
future printing may amend) rather empha- 
sizes the definitive character of Professor 
Vaughan's work, the objects of which are best 
stated in his own words: "to collect all the 
political writings of Rousseau in one body; 
to present a correct text of what he wrote; 

^The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Edited from 
the Original Manuscripts and Authentic Editions, with Introductions 
and Notes. C. E. Vaughan. Cambridge, 1915. 2 vols. 

48 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

and to define his place in the history of 
political thought." These objects are meas- 
urably attained in the work offered to the 
public. There are, no doubt, in the non- 
political writings of Rousseau passages not 
here assembled which bear upon his political 
philosophizing (for the 'natural' and the 
'political' man are not so separable in the 
process as in the product of Rousseau's 
reflection); but there is certainly nothing of 
importance for the understanding of his 
author's political thinking which Professor 
Vaughan has failed to include in his collection, 
while, in the way of positive virtue, this collec- 
tion adds fragments unpublished in editions 
of the collected works of Rousseau. The most 
interesting of these fragments is surely that on 
UHat de guerre, from the Neuchatel manu- 
script, though certain chapters in Book I of 
the first draft of the Contrat social are 
hardly second to this. The editor's further 
aim, to present a correct text of what Rous- 
seau actually wrote, has persuaded him into a 
minute scrupulosity in the notation of variants 
that would seem finical were its end less im- 
portant; for he has succeeded in correcting 
a vast number of obvious errors in the current 
texts, and in giving what is far the most accu- 
rate version of Rousseau's word and thought. 
Finally, in his general introduction, and in 
several minor articles, Professor Vaughan has 
contributed a study of Rousseau's place as a 
political thinker with which future students 

49 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

of this field of speculation must squarely 
reckon. Even a cursory examination of this 
edition of Rousseau's Political Writings will 
establish the conviction that its editor has 
not only performed a task honourable to 
scholarship, but that he could not have per- 
formed it with so painstaking a devotion had 
his labours been animated by less sustaining 
a sentiment than complete faith in the per- 
manent importance of his subject's contribu- 
tion to human welfare. The Vaughan edition 
is a finely conceived monument to Rousseau, 
the thinker. 

And it is in this that lies the dramatic pro- 
priety of the appearance of the work at the 
present hour. Rousseau is not the founder 
of the humanitarianism of the Enlightenment; 
but he is the subtlest and the most influential 
exponent of that political idealism which is 
the Enlightenment's greatest contribution 
to human thought and to men's affairs, — the 
political idealism which gave to the period its 
particular humanitarian cast, and, indeed, 
added a special (and we hope, ineffaceable) 
colour to the meanings of the words ' humanity' 
and 'humane.' 

Rousseau was a citizen of the one small 
state which, in his day, stood in the wide 
world conspicuously for republicanism. His 
life fell in the yeasty years of the diffusion of 
democratic belief among the peoples of West- 
ern Europe, and none can be said to be pre- 
mier to Rousseau as an agent of this diffusion. 

50 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

The political revolutions which, beginning 
in America and proceeding in France in the 
eighteenth century, were, in the nineteenth 
and early hours of the twentieth, to convert 
the greater portion of the world's states to 
republicanism, had already in Rousseau's 
lifetime made their first and most difficult 
move in the revolution of men's ideas in 
regard to polity. There are writers who tell 
us that the revolutions were the outcome, not 
of ideas, but of blind social instincts following 
the modellings of chance social environments; 
the contemporary apology for Teutonism, that 
it is the inevitable explosion of a pent-up 
geistliches gas is a notion of the same stripe; 
but such opinions must here be passed (some- 
what wearily, I confess) without controversy; 
the important fact remains, that, be they 
symptoms or causes, men's ideas are at least 
their conscious explanations of their actions. 
Now the soul of sound explanation is clear 
definition; and of such clarity Rousseau is 
master to a degree which makes him more than 
a father of the Revolution. Indeed, the 
greatest interest which attaches to a present- 
day examination of his doctrines is not as to 
whether they were the conscious impulses 
which French Revolutionists, in quoting them, 
believed them to be, but as to whether either 
the subtlety or the truth of Rousseau's theory 
has up to our time been understood by states- 
men or embodied in institutions. Our real 
concern with Rousseau is with the possible 

51 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

discover}^ of a teacher of political truth for 
the great hour of to-day. 

The final version of the Contrat social 
was published in 1762. In 19 15 what will 
long be the standard reference edition of this 
and the related writings of its author appears 
in the midst of a stupendous war, — a war 
which is being consciously fought for the over- 
throw and for the maintenance of political 
principles which Rousseau defined more 
capably than has any other modern. This, 
in itself, is sufficient incentive for a keen- 
minded return to the study of those humani- 
tarian doctrines in which our democracies were 
nurtured. It may be a fact (though democrats 
cannot believe this) that the modern emanci- 
pation of peoples was founded in delusion, 
and has been leading on to disillusion, now 
at hand; but even in such case it were the 
caution of reason to discover how so great an 
error of nature could have infected men's 
minds. It can hardly be less than fact ^'as the 
trial of democracy shows) that the core of 
democratic truth is even now but vaguely 
touched by the most convincedly democratic 
peoples; and this being so, there were only 
denial of reason in remitting the great analysis. 
Who, indeed, can doubt that the decades 
which are to follow the close of the world's 
most terrible political war will see men turning 
avidly to the study of political theory, striving 
to discover some wisdom of thought which 
will enable them to reduce the courses of their 

52 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

lives to order and to meet with mastering 
discipline such great upsurgings of brutish 
passion ? The task of a generation of thinkers 
is set relentlessly; the dial indicates the ap- 
pointed hour; philosophy must descend from 
the heights into the camps and towns of men. 
Is Rousseau still a guide in the field of dis- 
covery? Reputation assures him, at all events, 
a place beyond neglect. It is true that there 
are critics — concerned more with his per- 
sonality than with his thought — who see in 
him only a sentimentally romantic adventurer 
into the realm of ideas. On the other hand, 
the editor of this new edition of his political 
writings pays him such tribute as must 
challenge attention. Conceding Rousseau's 
shortcomings, still, he says, "there are two 
things which can never be forgotten. He 
gave men faith in their power to redress the 
wrongs of ages. And he held forth an ideal 
of civic life which has changed the face of 
Europe. Thanks to the Contrat social, the 
leaden rule of bureaucracy, hard though it 
be to break, is weakened and discredited. The 
ideal of a free people, united in one ' corporate 
self and working out one 'general will,' is 
coming, slowly but none the less surely, to 
take its place. That is the debt which the 
world owes to Rousseau. That is the glory 
which nothing can take from him." These 
claims command consideration, above all in 
an hour when no source of political truth can 
be allowed to pass untested. 

S3 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 
II 

Theories of polity rest ultimately upon 
conceptions of human nature. These concep- 
tions may be no more than dim prepossessions 
— as when the elders of Israel come to Samuel 
demanding a king, ^'that we also may be like 
all the nations"; or they may be themselves 
conscious and elaborated theories, as when 
Plato astutely figures the ideal state as but 
the great projection of the virtues of the ideal 
man. But in all cases where we can speak of 
conscious politics, there is covert or evident 
some determining idea of what men are or of 
what they ought to be. In a fair sense, the 
history of both political institutions and politi- 
cal speculation is exemplary of Aristotle's 
rule: that the first step to the discovery of 
what a state ought to be is the discovery of 
what men and life ought to be. 

Broadly taken, with reference to this rela- 
tion of political to anthropic theory, there are 
but two radical conceptions of man, and, cor- 
respondingly, but two radically different 
classes of theories of statecraft. The first, 
and by odds the more ancient division of 
thought, conceives man theologically and the 
state theocratically; the second, new in the 
world with Hellenism, conceives man naturally 
and the state legally, — or, as we might say, 
it sees both man and state with near and 
human vision. Each of these types of theory, 
theological and naturalistic, has numerous 

54 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIAN ISM 

historical variants; nor are there wanting 
mixtures, borrowing from both, as in Aquinas 
and Hobbes, — though in the mixed examples 
it is not difficult to percieve which is the parent 
stem and which the graft. But allowing for 
these, the broad division still remains radical; 
indeed, the world is at war to-day because that 
division is ineifaceable. 

It were mere mythology to hark back to 
Frazer's sacred and sacramental kings for 
the beginnings of the theological theory. His- 
tory, from its twilight days onward, is writ 
with example. The Pharaoh who was son of 
Amon; the Israelitic king, anointed of the 
Lord; the Csesar whose genius was the sove- 
reignty of Rome; the Holy Emperor pro- 
claimed and crowned by the Pontiff of Christ- 
endom; the Hohenzollern Kaiser, "taking his 
crown from God alone, without intervention 
of peoples or parliaments," — all belong in 
the one series, and all rest their claims upon 
the assumption that God is the disposer of 
fates which men are too contemptible to 
mould for themselves. "The great Gods, 
Determiners of Destinies, making great my 
Kingdom, I, Shalmaneser, king of multitudes, 
hero of Ashur, ruler of the Four Zones, all the 
world kisses my feet 1 " So run the earlier 
chapters of the world's history. A dispatch 
from Berlin (August 2, 19 17) quotes Burgo- 
master Reicke, of Berlin, as saying: "We call 
for the benefit of the counsels of workingmen, 
but the word is quietly passed from the gov- 

55 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANlSM 

ernment table, 'These fellows cannot be told 
all; just treat them like children,' What 
is wanted is ... a government of men 
who are not educated to believe that a bureau- 
crat necessarily knows better than an ordinary 
mortal." The difference between these two 
utterances — of the Assyrian king and the 
German burgomaster — is not so much dis- 
tance in time as distinction of the points of 
view of individuals viewing the same kind of 
political fact. 

The theological conception of the state 
implies necessarily the assumption of chosen 
rulers and a chosen people. In the earlier 
stages of the world's history, the ruler divinely 
elect was less concerned with the grounds of 
his elevation — usually divine descent or 
kinship — than with the fact and the obliga- 
tions he conceived it to entail: if kings were 
'hostile to Ashur' or if the smoke of burning 
cities were a savour in the god's nostrils, the 
duty of the 'sons of Ashur' was defined. The 
wars of the Faithful (Christian or Muslim) 
against the Infidel (Muslim or Christian or 
Pagan) were not actuated by a different 
motive, — which is still in our own day, in the 
antithesis of white men and brown, more than 
a reminiscence. 

But such prejudices, in the course of time, 
come to be fortified with conscious theory. 
Already in the Jewish prophets is introduced 
the idea that the Chosen People endure suf- 
fering and captivity as the penalty of der- 

56 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

eliction in worship. Christian theology ca- 
tholically affirming the demerit of mankind with 
the salvation of an elect few by act of grace, 
drew up the plan for a more sr.tisfyingly 
rational philosophy of the state. Man by 
nature is corrupt, anarchical, helpless of sal- 
vation; he is damned and without help from 
above must remain damned; only the Divine 
Grace can vouchsafe that help, and it does 
vouchsafe it in the two institutions. Church 
and State, which are its temporal vehicles; 
for man, prelate or communicant, monarch or 
subject, there is no duty save obedience; for 
the institution, civil or ecclesiastical, there is 
needed no sanction save its divine imposition. 
This is the conscious philosophy of Aquinas 
and Dante; it is the root of the conceptions of 
Calvin and of Hobbes; and it is not funda- 
mentally evaded even by such thinkers as 
Milton and Grotius. Indeed, from the reign 
of Constantine to Louis XIV and the last of 
the Stuarts, this philosophy was the moral 
bulwark of practically all European kingships. 
Of all the presentations of the theological 
theory of man and state, the most majestic 
is the De Monarchia. Dante's point of depart- 
ure is the finis universalis civilitatis humani 
generis, for he says, "it were folly to suppose 
that there is an end of this civilization and of 
that, and not one end for all. " The nature of 
this end is determined by human nature; 
creation exists not for the sake of the created 
beings (individual men), but for the proper 

57 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

functioning of the creatures. With man, this 
operatio propria is the actualization of the 
potential intellect with which he alone among 
creatures is endowed. But this process can be 
effectively realized only under a universal 
peace, — "the best of all those things ordained 
for our blessedness"; which implies a ruler, to 
judge the contentions of men. Further, since 
the whole human race is ordained to a single 
end, this ruler must be one and single — "all 
parts should be subordinate to kingdoms; 
kingdoms themselves should be ordered with 
reference to a single prince," the emperor; 
and the whole civil world be thus reduced to 
hierarchy. Granting his contentions as to the 
meaning of life and the goal of civilization and 
assuming the validity of the historical argu- 
ments by which Dante would establish the 
claim of the German Emperor, his conception 
is at once grandiose and rationally sound. 

Certainly the mediaeval theory, with its 
dogmatic bluntness, is far more respectable 
than its psychologized ectypes of the Hegelian 
schools. Hegel's notion that history is a 
theodicy, a progressive manifestation of God 
in creation, is, of course, the mediaeval view. 
But when he and his kindred thinkers go on to 
expound their theodicies in terms of outer 
sense being moulded to inner form, that the 
latter may contemplate itself as structured 
from evaporated particularities (for when 
"the authority of rational aim is acknowledged, 
privileges and particularities melt away before 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

the common object of the state") and apexed 
by self-sufficient absolutes ("the government 
rests with the official world, and the personal 
decision of the monarch constitutes its apex") 
then we are far in the morass of the over- 
individual state. It is in this morass that half 
the civilized world is to-day embogged. 

Ill 

Over against this theological theory of man 
and the state is the naturalistic or humanistic 
theory classical in origin and rationalistic in 
form. It is implicit in the early traditions of 
Svise men' as lawgivers; it is conscious and 
express in the activities of sophists teaching 
an art of politics; it is quite open in the 
manneredly ingenuous remark of the Athenian 
envoys, "Of the gods we believe and of men we 
know that by a law of their nature wherever 
they can rule they will. " Socrates, descending 
from the clouds to ask about justice, proposes 
to probe this theory to its truth; and Plato, 
carrying forward the investigation, discloses 
the essential truth. 

The Republic is not less instructive in its 
method than in its content. Plato begins by ex- 
posing current superficialities, — the shallow 
honesty of the merchant's son, the shallower 
kratopolity of the sophistic bully. He goes on 
to sketch the pattern of a state endowed with 
the virtues which most men concede, with 
justice and temperance and courage and wis- 

59 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

dom, and he shows that these virtues, in the 
macropoHs, are but the true enlargement of 
the virtues of the micropoHs, which is the 
citizen's soul, and that citizenship itself is 
truly measured by the fairness and harmony 
with which these virtues are developed. 
Thereat, having completed the reduction from 
state to citizen, he reverses his procedure, 
asking subtly what is the nature of that good 
of which the virtues are the instruments; 
for if the virtues of the state are patterned in 
the virtues of the man, then the good which 
the state is meant to bring will be found pat- 
terned in the good which is the height of 
human nature. That good Plato finds to lie 
in knowledge, and in the kingship of philoso- 
phy; and having determined this, he turns 
once again to statecraft, judging states by the 
types of men which they engender and by 
which they are in return engendered. But 
the inquiry is still not ended. The ideal state 
exists for the manifestation of what is good 
in human nature; but the good that is in 
human nature is at the last definable only by 
the good that is discoverable in metaphysical 
nature, — that is the supreme sanction and 
the supreme sovereign, the revelation of which 
(using the language of myth) is the vision 
of Er. 

Plato's method here is simply and rationally 
empirical. The state is measured by human 
nature; human nature is the glass in which 
we must read universal nature: 'macropolis, 

60 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIAN ISM 

micropolis; microcosm, macrocosm.' In the 
course of the argument all the essential ideals 
of Greek polity are defined, directly or by im- 
plication. Justice is a harmony of the human 
virtues; and these virtues are civic for the 
reason that man is by nature and necessity 
a political animal. Law is the law of nature, 
reflected in human interpretations or insights, 
— for nature itself is humanistic. The sover- 
eign is that good which all men desire, and 
which intelligence may attain, — for in the 
world by which men are created the good is 
sovereign. Finally, liberty is the recognition 
of law, provided that law is founded upon 
knowledge of the good. As Aristotle has it, 
"the good man is the measure of everything." 
Plato's ideal polity is often described as being 
socialistic; but in truth neither he nor Aris- 
totle ever loses sight of the fact that the state 
exists only for the well-being of the indi- 
vidual, and in a supra-social, a metaphysical 
sense. Man is political, and the state should 
bring him realization of his political respon- 
sibilities; but he is also more than political, 
he is philosophical, and the state should leave 
hirn free to realize his philosophical possi- 
bilities. This does not mean the anarchy of 
personal lusts, — as so many moderns would 
make democracy to mean; it means instead 
the rational imitation of a pattern citizen, a 
type of human being, an ideal individual life, 
with a 'work' to do. Nor does it mean — as 
the Hegelizers infer — that the individual is 

6i 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARJANISM 

to be absorbed in the state, the structure 
itself being the end. Plato has once for all 
divided himself from the collectivists in that 
divinest of his utterances: "In heaven there 
is laid up a pattern of it, which he who would 
may behold . . . but whether such an one 
exist or will ever exist on earth is no matter, for 
he will live after the manner of that city, 
rejecting all other. " 

To the ideal programme of Plato's Re- 
public there is a curious and striking parallel 
in the development of Roman law. This begins 
with the formulation of the customs and enact- 
ments of the early city in the jus civile, ex- 
pressing current and uncritical conceptions 
of duty. It proceeds, with the growth of the 
Republic's empire, to a recognition of the 
virtues of states as men empirically know 
them, expressed in the jus gentium. As a con- 
sequence of comparison, and a search for 
general principles, it seeks to define what is 
fundamentally true of human nature, and this 
is the jus naturale; and finally, in some Stoic 
rulers at least, there arises the conception of 
the metaphysical foundation of the natural 
law of mankind in their universal citizenship 
in the cosmopolis. The whole procedure is, 
as it were, a vast historical elucidation of 
Plato, beginning and ending, as did he, human- 
istically, and in the process establishing such 
a body of legal thought that the Persizing 
emperors (West and East seeking to introduce 
Oriental notions of monarchical divinity) 

62 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIAN ISM 

could not even colour, with their purples, 
its rational humanism. 

The root of that humanism is already vigor- 
ous in the Lex XII Tabularum. " If one sum- 
mon a man to court, let him go." "As the 
tongue shall have pronounced, so let it be." 
"As a man shall have appointed by his will, 
so let it be." Here are the definitions of 
responsibility, — responsibility of the citizen 
to the courts, of neighbour to neighbour, of a 
man to himself; and it is such responsibility 
that is the charter of human freedom. Under 
the Republic a law was regarded as an obliga- 
tion assumed voluntarily by the people: pop- 
ulus iuhet, 'the people bind themselves.' In 
Justinian's Digest the laws are regarded as 
binding because 'established by the decision 
of the people'; and the high point of Roman 
legal thinking is reached in Ulpian's definition 
of justice, which the Digest quotes, as " a con- 
stant and perpetual will to give to each his 
right." The will, the intelligence, the con- 
sciousness of the citizen, is court of last resort. 

To Roman jurisprudential philosophy 
Christianity brought its own peculiar addi- 
tion. On the ecclesiastical side, and especially 
in conjunction with feudalism, Christian the- 
ology went strongly to the fortifying of hier- 
archy, and in politics, to the vindication of 
divine rights. But another, and w4th this 
inconsistent, doctrine appears from the first. 
Christian theology necessarily insisted upon 
the freedom of the individual will. 

63 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIAN! SM 

Lo maggior don, che Dio per sua larghezza 

fesse creando, ed alia sua bontate 

piu confo"mato, e quel ch' ei piu apprezza, 

fu della volonta la libertate,- 

di che le creature intelligent!, 

e tutte e sole furo e son dotate. 

Dante tries, in the De Monarchia, to twist 
this need for freedom of judgment to the 
cause of absolutism (only the judgment above 
greed can be free, and only the monarch can 
have this); but the incongruity is gaping. 
Milton is far more rational in employing the 
same theological premise to justify the free 
commonwealth. God gave Adam "freedom to 
choose, for reason is but choosing; he had 
else been a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam 
as he is in the motions. . . . They are 
not skilful considerers of human things who 
imagine to remove sin by removing the matter 
of sin. . . Suppose we could expel sin, " by 
removing temptation, "how much we thus 
expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue: for 
the matter of them both is the same." God, 
"though He commands us temperance, jus- 
tice, continence, yet pours out before us even 
to a profuseness all desirable things, and gives 
Ub minds that can wander beyond all limit 
and satiety." Liberty of this parlous type 
represents a far cry from that freedom which 
Hegel makes the genius of the German world, 
— "an unlimited self-determination which 
has its own absolute form as its purport. " 

Of the Christian contribution there is no 
64 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

more striking statement than that of Las 
Casas's "Memoir on the question as to the 
power of kings to ahenate their subjects, 
their cities, and their jurisdiction".^ Ail men 
are by the right of nature free, says Las 
Casas, — and his words have the ring of a 
trumpet. Reason and the civil law both 
recognize this truth. "The human species 
having everywhere the same reasoning nature, 
God has not willed that one man be born sub- 
ject to another, but that all should be equal — 
for, following St. Thomas, the essence of the 
intellectual faculty is not a thing relative from 
one man to another, but a moral being, ab- 
solute, essential, and necessarily pertaining 
to each individual; in sort that individual 
liberty is a right accorded by God himself, 
as an essential attribute of man — which is, 
in fact, the principle and source of natural 
right [jus naturale].'^ Las Casas, whose "Me- 
moir" is a veritable bill of rights, goes on to 
lay down the foundations of politics. A 
'freeman' is "one who enjoys the power of 
exercising his free will as he understands it, in 
disposing of his person, his goods, his actions 
and his rights, without being submitted to the 
necessity of obtaining permission to do so 
from another man." "The free will of the 
nation is the unique efficient cause and the 
sole immediate and veritable source of all 

^This "Memoir" is included in QLuvres de Las Casas, edited by 
J. A. Llorente (Paris, 1822). Llorente's French version is translated 
from the first published edition, Qucestio de imperatoria vel regia 
potestate, etc. (Speyer, 1571). 

65 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIAN ISM 

power of kings and princes"; and the nation, 
freely expressing its wish, is "also the sole 
veritable final cause and object of this trans- 
mission of power," whose object is "the ad- 
vantage or good of all." Power is delegated 
to rulers only with "natural reservations, not 
expressed by the men, conserving intact their 
independence and that of their goods, and the 
right of submitting only with their previous 
consent to deprivation of goods and the estab- 
lishment of imposts. " " Liberty is the greatest 
good a people can enjoy." The king "has no 
power to command what is contrary to the 
public good, because he has no authority 
except as minister of the law." Alienation 
can only be with "the consent of the nation, 
when for the good of the state or from political 
necessity such action is useful," for "the 
state is a moral body, " not a property. 

Las Casas is worth quoting at length, for 
we are not accustomed to think of a sixteenth- 
century Spanish friar as a formulator of the 
principles of American independence, none 
the less virile because his reasonings bear the 
flavour of scholasticism. Like Milton, he is 
in spirit of the Renaissance, in spirit a hu- 
manist, and more than a precursor of the 
humanitarians. Other Renaissance thinkers 
are humanistic without being humanitarian. 
Machiavelli, frankly cynical of morality, 
making the tyrant's lust the measure of 
political sagacity, is such an one. So also is 
Grotius, who can conceive of a people as made 

66 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

up of individuals {populus est ex eorum cor- 
porum genere quod ex distantibus constat) 
bonded together by one habit and one spirit, 
but which, nevertheless, owes to its sover- 
eign only submission. And again so is 
Hobbes, whose introduction to the Levia- 
than is a treatise on man, in which he sets 
forth with unrelieved pessimism such a picture 
of human nature as only theology and anarchy 
could contrive, — the picture of the natural 
man mired in evils, for release from which 
the loss of liberty were a cheerful price. Back 
of all such thinking there is the lurking me- 
diaeval conviction that man is by nature cor- 
rupt, and that without grace from church 
and sovereign he is helplessly damned. There 
is, to be sure, one point with which this 
thought is in harmony with the Greek: the 
sovereign is still the good, — only here the 
good is of another world than this and of 
another nature than man's. 

IV 

Few changes in the history of thought are 
more quiet and fundamental than that be- 
tween the seventeenth and the eighteenth 
centuries. The difference is not so much of 
content of ideas, as of temper. Hobbes to 
Locke, Montaigne to Montesquieu, Calvin to 
Rousseau, — everywhere the antithesis is 
sharp. The late Renaissance was intellect- 
ually eager, but spiritually it was still in the 

67 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

shadow of the middle ages; it studied the 
thought of classical antiquity with zest, but 
with all its humanism, it failed to assimilate 
that first essential of classical humanism, — 
belief in the value of the immediate, cis- 
sepulchral life. It was thoroughly pessimistic 
of the world and the flesh, and it looked for- 
ward to Judgment far more with a gloomy 
gratification in the promise of just punish- 
ments than with any radiance of millennial 
hope. Such a belief, for example, as our 
modern one in progress was all out of its tune. 
The eighteenth century is the first period to 
recover something of Hellenic optimism. The 
Enlightenment is all aglow with rosy remi- 
niscence of the Golden Age and with rosier 
anticipations of Utopia. Man becomes trans- 
formed, and with his change of colour the 
whole universe alters its hue. Jesus had 
taught centuries before that the private soul 
of a common man is worth saving, — a doc- 
trine that rang strange in the ears of pagans; 
but the fruit of Eden had, in a sense, theo- 
logically soured this teaching, and feudalism, 
ecclesiastical and civil, had gone all against 
its political realization. Now, in curious 
coincidence, a return to worldliness brought 
also a conception of spiritual democracy. It 
is true the armory of democracy was stocked 
in the seventeenth century: natural law and 
the rights of man, the social contract, liberty, 
equality, consent of the governed, — all had 
been defined. But these arms could work no 

68 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

revolution until they were seized upon by 
men invigorated by a faith in men; and such 
were the thinkers of the Enlightenment. 
Locke, quietly assuming that the law of 
nature is the law of reason and that men are 
reasonable seekers after the good, makes of 
the original compact, not as it had been with 
Hobbes an instrument for the abjuring of 
natural liberties, but their stay and guarantee. 
Montesquieu, dispassionately examining the 
legal concepts of all peoples in order to dis- 
cover a law of laws, as it were from men's 
commonsense of right, restored to mankind — 
so Voltaire phrased it — the title-deeds of 
society. And Rousseau, not dispassionately, 
but passionately believing in man, erected the 
whole idealism of his time into a great brief 
for democracy. 

The Discours sur rinegalite and the Con- 
trat social are the two prime documents 
of this brief. These two works, though pub- 
lished only a few years apart, have been 
taken as contraries: the Discourse as an 
extreme expression of individualism, the 
Social Contract as a championing of col- 
lectivism. The contrariety, however, is far 
more apparent than real. Narrowly viewed, 
the two essays are complementary, not con- 
flicting. Rousseau, being, like Plato, a phil- 
osopher of imagination, employs, like Plato, 
the language of myth: in the Discours sur 
rinegalite, as in the still earlier Discours 
sur les sciences et les arts, the my thus used 

69 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

is of the aureate innocence of a Saturnian 
past; in the Contrat social it is a culture 
myth, the conversion of troglodytes into men. 
But if the subtler meaning of these myths be 
sought, it will be found that in both cases 
Rousseau is seeking to define the essential 
man; human nature is first taken in its indi- 
vidual aspect, and the consequences of its 
individualism are examined; it is taken again 
in its social aspect, and the consequences of 
this are followed out. It happens, as inevitably 
must be, that on the individual side the key 
to this nature is found to be emotion, — and 
Rousseau is thence viewed as a 'sentimental- 
ist'; it happens again, and inevitably, that 
reason is the key to the interpretation of the 
moral nature, — but Rousseau is rarely enough 
given the credit of his rationalism. 

The main contention of the two Discourses 
is identical. Both are concerned with the 
cause of inequality among men. The Dis- 
course on the Sciences and the Arts is de- 
voted to the inquiry as to whether their culti- 
vation has worked to a purification of morals, 
and Rousseau finds in the negative; their 
function has rather been to emphasize social 
complexities and to serve social inequalities: 
virtue, "the sublime science of simple souls," 
and conscience, heard "in the silence of the 
passions," — these furnish the sufficient phil- 
osophy of life to humble and equal men, 
unperturbed by the lure of renown. The 
Second Discourse attacks the same problem of 

70 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

inequality, not from the point of view of such 
secondary agencies as the arts and sciences, 
but in search of its fundamental cause. This 
is private property: "The first who, having 
enclosed a bit of land, assumed to say, 'This 
is mine,' and found men simple enough to 
believe him, was the true founder of civil 
society"; and thereafter, "slavery and wretch- 
edness germinate and grow with the harvests." 
The recognition of those primitive conventions 
which were the first laws the institution of 
the first magistrates: these steps follow, first 
as guarantees of equality, but eventually, in 
consequence of abuse, as sources of despotism. 
The last and worst degeneration oi society 
is reached when men " become willing to bear 
chains in order to impose them in their turn," 
when "the rich cease to be happy when the 
poor cease to be wretched," and when rulers 
"give to society an air of apparent concord 
while sowing the seeds of a real division." 
In other words, it is the perversion of the 
moral sense that is the ruin of society. 

For Rousseau rests his theory upon a clear- 
cut and fundamentally optimistic conception 
of human nature. What makes man man are 
his compassion for his fellows and his per- 
fectibility. The operations of the human soul 
anterior to reason are two: first, the instinct 
for well-being and self-preservation; second, 
the repugnance which men feel at the sight 
of suffering in other sensible beings, especially 
men. Pity is a disposition altogether appro- 

71 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

priate to beings as feeble and subject to so 
many ills as are we, and it is the more useful 
in that it precedes all reflection (" it is not 
necessary to make a philosopher of man before 
making him man," — this is directed at 
Locke); and pity is the source of all the vir- 
tues. The golden rule of natural goodness 
is: "Achieve thy good with the least possible 
ill to others." There is, however, a danger in 
this virtue of compassion: it sentimentalizes 
the passions, above all the passion of love, 
and in sentimentalizing intensifies them. 
Thence is born a dark progeny, — jealousy, 
anger, blood-letting, — and the moral nature, 
even in discovering virtue, is found to be dis- 
covering vice. 

A similar peril attaches to human perfect- 
ibility. Perfectibility is the power which dis- 
tinguishes man from the animals, for the rea- 
son that it is based upon the distinctively 
human power of free choice. Illimitable 
progress is made possible by this faculty, 
which "resides as much in the species as in the 
individual." But Rousseau is wise enough to 
see that the same power which makes possible 
progress makes possible its opposite; the 
quality which opens the path to perfection 
opens likewise the brbad and easy decline. 
Particularly is this the case when the power 
of choice owns no master save the passions of 
the individual. Intellect and emotion mu- 
tually fortify and develop one another; it is 
by the activity of the passions that reason 

72 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

perfects itself; the passions in turn draw 
their origin from our needs and their progress 
from our comprehensions. For the man and 
the race whose choices are governed by pas- 
sions — even when these are compassions — 
there is Httle prospect save for spiritual 
anarchy: such a rule of private desire we see 
monstrously enacted in the civilization that is 
up to now created. Is it a marvel that, view- 
ing what intelligence, as the servitor of the 
passions, has made of society, we should look 
wistfully backward to the moralless innocency 
of the first state of the soul? And seeing 
whither we are come, having discovered that 
society is being perverted under the leader- 
ship of private feelings, which not pity itself 
can universalize, is there no further discovery 
of a nature in man that can set his feet upon 
the pathway of perfection.'' 

This is essentially the question which is 
put by Rousseau's two Discourses. It is also 
the measure of their reputed pessimism, which 
is really no pessimism at all; for Rousseau is 
throughout an intense advocate of human 
merit, — of the value of the moral instinct, 
of the natural goodness of man, of the efficacy 
of human reason. He has, however, presented 
but one side, the individualistic side, of human 
nature; man is not merely private, he is also 
social and political in his nature; and it is in 
the analysis of our political nature that the 
corrective for the excesses of private indulg- 
ence of private passions must be found. It is 

73 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

to the task of discovery that the Contrat 
social is devoted; in its theories the comple- 
mentary element is defined and human nature 
is, in idea at least, shown normally whole. 

The theory of a contractual organization 
of the first polities had been advanced by 
Hobbes as a justification of the indefeasible- 
ness of the powers of the sovereign, abjured 
by the contractors in their act. By Locke a 
like theory had been used as a sort of charter 
of rights, pertaining to men by nature good 
and reasonable, who by their contract reserved 
to themselves intact their natural liberties. 
It was employed by Rousseau, mythically 
(for with him the compact was clearly not 
conceived as an historical event), in a very 
different sense: as a convenient and vivid 
figure by which to express that society is at 
once deliberate and mutual in character, the 
creation of rational beings endowed with an 
appetitus societatis (no mere gregarious instinct, 
but a political sense). In the Second Discourse 
Rousseau speaks of the research into the 
nature of "the fundamental pact of all govern- 
ment" as yet to make, provisionally stating 
that in character it is a voluntary obligation 
to observe laws. The Contrat social is the 
obvious carrying on of this research, directed 
to the discovery of some principle of the unifi- 
cation of "what law permits and interest pre- 
scribes, to the end that justice and utility be 
found not divided." More particularly, the 
problem of the contract is : "To find a form of 

74 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIAN ISM 

association which defends and protects with 
the whole force of the association the person 
and the goods of each member, and by which 
each, uniting with all, obeys only himself, and 
remains as free as before." 

The solution of this problem is found in the 
doctrine of the volonU generale^ and of its 
primacy with respect to the particular will of 
the individual. The terms of the contract 
reduce to: "Each of us mutually places his 
person and all his power under the supreme 
direction of the general will; and as a body 
we receive each member as an indivisible part 
of the whole." Thus is formed the body poli- 
tic, which by this very act gets its unity, or 
moi commun, its life and its will. Passively 
conceived, it is a state; actively, a sovereign; 
as compared with others, a power. The asso- 
ciates are collectively a people; as sharing its 
sovereignty, citizens; as under its laws, sub- 
jects. The act of association is thus a recip- 
rocal engagement of the public with all its 
members, each individual holding a double 
relation. He is a member of the sovereign 
with respect to individuals, a member of the 
state with respect to the sovereign. The au- 
thority of public deliberation rises directly 
from these relationships, but it does not extend 
to a control of sovereignty itself, which cannot 
impose an unbreakable law upon itself; even 

Waughan points out (Vol. I, pp. 423-33) that Rousseau probably 
owes the suggestion of the idea of the general will to Diderot's article 
in U encyclopidie on " Droit naturel," here reprinted. 

75 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

the social contract has no sanction save its 
own sanity. Further, the sovereign can have 
no interest contrary to the best interest of 
its members, for which reason it has no need 
of guarantees from its members. It is their 
collective interest. Individual men may have 
individual wills opposing the general will (in 
which as social beings they participate); and 
this, of course, is destructive to the body poli- 
tic. Hence, that the social pact be not vain, 
it belongs to the engagement, tacitly, that 
force may be used to compel obedience — ce 
qui ne signifie autre chose sinon qu'on le forcera 
d'etre libre. 

Law is the formal expression of the general 
will (which, because it is general, necessitates 
that all laws be universal in form and intent). 
"When the whole people decrees for all the 
people, it considers only itself; and if a rela- 
tion is then formed, it is of the entire object 
from one point of view to the entire object 
from another point of view, with no division 
of the whole. The matter of enactment is then 
general, as is the will which enacts. This act 
I call law." In short, laws, ne sont que des 
registres de nos volontes ; and any state ruled 
by laws (that is, general rather than individual 
will) is thereby republican in genius. In a 
passage of the Economie politique Rous- 
seau says: "There are two infallible rules of 
conduct . . . the one is the spirit of the law, 
which should serve in the decision of a case 
which has not been foreseen; the other is the 

76 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

general will, source and supplement of all 
laws, and which ought always to be consulted 
in default of them." This is clearly the prin- 
ciple in accordance with which democracies 
grow. 

It is an easy matter to misinterpret Rous- 
seau's doctrine of the general will, especially 
in the direction of collectivism. In the first 
place, there is nothing mystical or emotional 
about it; it is thoroughly rationalistic. The 
moi commun is never a *mob soul' nor is it 
ever the 'self of an 'over-individual state'; 
and the volonte generate is always a true will, 
the result of a rational choice and the ex- 
pression of a conscious responsibility; in this 
Rousseau is a follower of Dante and Milton 
and the Christian theologians. In a significant 
passage of the first draft of the Social Con- 
tractj its author says: "The general will is 
in each individual a pure act of the under- 
standing which reasons in the silence of the 
passions as to what man should demand of his 
fellows and as to what his fellows have a right 
to demand of him." At the close of the First 
Discourse Rousseau had said that the voice 
of conscience, teaching the Right, must be 
heard " in the silence of the passions." In the 
course of the Second he had ascribed to the 
species even more than to the individual that 
power of free choice which is the essence of rea- 
son and the source of human perfectibility. 
In the first draft of the Social Contract he 
had stated — following Locke — that the law 

77 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

of nature (as applied to man) is the law of 
reason. Finally, in the authorized version of 
this document, he comes to the conclusion 
that natural liberty, which has no bournes 
excepting the powers of the individual, is no 
true liberty; true liberty is civil liberty, 
limited by the general will. Here is moral 
freedom, based on self-control; and in truly 
Platonic phrase he adds, "the impulsion of 
appetite alone is slavery, while obedience to 
the law which one prescribes for oneself is 
freedom." Self-prescription of law is political 
sanity, and in a passage behind which surely 
stands the image of the Socrates of the 
Crito, Rousseau tells how a man, as citizen 
and sovereign, inflicts upon himself the pun- 
ishments which, as erring man, he has incurred 
under the law. 

The change from the natural to the civil 
state means the enthronement of reason. But 
are there advantages in this change? Yes, 
says Rousseau; duty replaces impulse, right 
succeeds appetite, reason rules inclination, and 
the whole good of human nature receives nev/ 
possibilities of development. "Instead of 
destroying a natural equality, the funda- 
mental pact substitutes a moral and legitimate 
equality for the physical inequality with 
which nature endows men; and while capable 
of inequality in force or genius, they become 
equal by convention and right." "If one ask 
precisely in what consists the greatest good 
of all, which should be the end of all legisla- 

78 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMAN ITARIANISM 

tion, it will be found to reduce to two prime 
objects, liberty and equality. Liberty, since 
all particular dependency is but so much 
power taken from the body of the state; 
equality, because liberty can not subsist 
without it." Here we are back again to 
classical grounds, moving in the thought of 
Plato and Aristotle. The good is the sover- 
eign, and the sanction and instrument of the 
good is that faculty of reason which first makes 
men of us, and then, in freeing us from the 
rule of passion, makes us truly free. 

Classical, too, is the optimistic view of 
human nature implied in the doctrine of per- 
fectibility. The first part of the earlier Dis- 
course opens: "It is a grand and beautiful 
spectacle to see man issue, as it were, from 
naught by his proper efforts, dissipate by the 
light of his reason the shadows in which nature 
has enveloped him, elevate himself above 
himself, mount in the ardor of his spirit even 
to celestial regions, traverse with a giant's 
pace, like unto the sun, the vast expanse of the 
universe, and finally, what is yet greater and 
more difficult, enter within himself in order 
there to study man, to know his nature, his 
duties, and his end." The latter phrase, the 
study of man, represents Rousseau's concep- 
tion of his own task : in its execution he probed 
and condemned the unbalanced leadership of 
passions and ambitions; even when these lead 
to the development of science and art and the 
establishment of polities, they are not com- 

79 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

parable in goodness with simple virtues; the 
good that is the realization of right human 
living must come through the cultivation of 
the powers of understanding, at once imper- 
sonal and universal. With a soundly Gallic 
sagacity Rousseau saw that the 'general will' 
is founded in understanding of affairs, what 
the Greeks called phronesis — a something 
much nearer to our 'common sense' than to 
the thing we name 'public sentiment'; and 
he saw, too, that there must be back of this, 
as its ultimate sanction, a faith in the powers 
of men to achieve their own good, and a uni- 
verse which justifies this faith. In this sense 
he was spokesman of the rationalistic belief 
in human progress which was characteristic 
of his century, and which found its perhaps 
supreme expression — if but for the reason 
that its author was, when he wrote, a pro- 
scribed and hunted man — ■ in the words of 
Condorcet: "In past experience, in observa- 
tion of the progress so far made by science 
and by civilization, in the analysis of the 
march of the human spirit and of the develop- 
ment of its faculties, we find the most power- 
ful motives to believe that nature has put no 
term to our hopes." 

V 

Rousseau closes the Contrat social with the 
brief announcement that the external rela- 
tions of states constitute a subject too vast 

80 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

for his short Hfe. There is evidence (dis- 
cussed by the editor in a note) that he did, 
however, outline a work on federation, and 
that the manuscript of the outline was de- 
stroyed by a friend to whom he had com- 
mitted it. For such notions as we have as to 
Rousseau's theories of international relations 
we are confined to stray passages of his 
published works and to inferences from the 
general character of his political philosophy. 
But the study of even this meager material 
is not without reward. In the first place 
Rousseau regarded the republic as the highest 
form of state, and he regarded it as essentially 
a form adapted to the small state; he is, 
therefore, quite with the Greeks in idealizing 
the small democracy, or aristodemocracy (to 
borrow a new term). In the ideal state every 
member should know every other member: 
that is the formula, which, with attendant 
qualities, is expounded in Contrai social 
(II, x), and with greater length and pic- 
turesqueness in the dedication to the Sec- 
ond Discourse. This dedication is to his 
native Geneva, and to certain passages of it 
our own day has replied with a cruel irony: 
*'I would choose," says Rousseau, "for my 
nativity ... a country deterred by a happy 
powerlessness from the ferocious love of con- 
quests, and guaranteed by a position yet more 
happy from the fear of itself becoming the 
conquest of another state; a free city, placed 
between several peoples among whom none 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

has interest in invading it, while each is 
interested in preventing its invasion by 
others. . . . Whose citizens, therefore, if they 
follow the exercise of arms, do so rather to re- 
tain among them that warlike ardour and hery 
courage which sit so well with liberty and nou- 
rish the taste for it, rather than from any 
necessity of self-defense " — altogether such as 
yours of Geneva, whose happiness is assured; 
for "honourable treaties fix your limits, as- 
sure your rights, and safeguard your repose." 
With Belgium and Servia under their eyes, 
the men of Geneva to-day can hardly share 
their tow^nsman's confidence !^ 

Not every state is physically adapted to 
the ideal form. The true size of a state should 
be determined by the relation of the popula- 
tion to the possibilities of nourishment af- 
forded by the territories, not merely by census 
or square miles. There is in every body politic 

^It should be noted that while Rousseau's ideal of the feasible 
republic is of the small state, yet the conception of a republican fed- 
eration of Europe appealed powerfully to him, as a vision. In his 
Jugement upon the Projet de paix perpetuelle of the Abbe of Saint- 
Pierre, he remarks that to realize the Abbe's European republic 
for a single day would be enough to ensure its eternal duration. 
The real interests of both princes and peoples are in such federation, 
but their apparent interests turn sovereigns " away form the empire of 
Law to submit to that of Fortune"; rulers, like senseless pilots, 
though they drive their ship upon the rocks, prefer the vain show of 
commanding their servants, to the safe anchorage; while ministers 
must keep their princes embroiled to render themselves necessary — 
choosing to lose the state, if need be, rather than their positions. 
Thus, though the project of the Abbe is wise, his means of executing it 
issue from the simplicity of his heart. "He honestly imagines that it 
is only necessary to assemble a Congress, and there propose his Arti- 
cles, in order that they should be signed and all would be done, " — 
which is to judge as an infant. Rousseau's Jugement abounds with 
caustic phrases pertinent to our day. 

82 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

a maximum of power which it should not 
pass, and from which it often departs in grow- 
ing in size. The relation of population to food 
supply is the true measure of this maximum 
power. The vigour born of good government 
rather than the resources furnished by a 
great territory is the source of welfare. Every 
people so placed that its only alternatives 
are commerce or war is weak in itself. "There 
have been states so constituted that the neces- 
sity of conquest entered into their very con- 
stitution, so that to maintain themselves they 
were forced to expand unceasingly. Perhaps 
they have even felicitated themselves on this 
happy necessity, which showed them, more- 
over, with the term of their aggrandizement, 
the momemt of their inevitable fall." In 
the fragment of Uetat de guerre, Rousseau 
outlines a kind of law of compensation be- 
tween states, tending to equalize large and 
small: "It is necessary, in order that a state 
subsist, that the vivacity of its passions 
supplement that of its movements, and that 
its will intensify as much as its power relaxes. 
It is the law of conservation which nature 
herself establishes among species, maintain- 
ing them all, in spite of their inequalities. 
It is also, to speak in passing, the reason why 
small states have proportionally more vigour 
than large ones. For public sensibility does 
not increase with territory; the more this ex- 
tends, the more the will weakens and move- 
ments become enfeebled; and the great body, 

83 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

surcharged with its own weight, sinks lan- 
guidly into decay." 

It is worth remarking that the biological 
analogy employed here and so generally by 
Rousseau is not with him a source of self- 
deception: he is too sagacious to surrender 
his imagination to the delusion that the life 
of a nation is but the life of an individual writ 
large, — a delusion horrible in its consequences 
when those who suifer from it conceive it to 
be their duty to strike down the senescent 
elders whose heirs they conceive themselves 
to be. It is true that in the Economie poli- 
tique, after refuting the notion that the 
nation is a larger family, Rousseau draws a 
Platonic likeness of it as an organism, — ani- 
mal body and members; but in U Hat de 
guerre, he makes no less explicit the differ- 
ence. Man, the animal, is fundamentally 
independent of his similars; the limits of his 
growth are fixed by nature; his life is short, 
his years are counted, and even his passions 
have their measures. The state, on the con- 
trary, is an artificial body (which means that 
it is artificed and sustained by human reason); 
it has no determined measure; its growth is 
indefinite; and, indeed, its safety demands 
that it outgrow its neighbours. "The in- 
equality of men has bournes set by the hand 
of nature; that of societies can grow end- 
lessly until the one shall have absorbed them 
all." 

This is the source of monstrosity in states, 
84 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

and above all of the monstrosity of war. Rous- 
seau leaves us in no doubt as to war: it has 
in it nothing natural and nothing reasonable; 
it is wholly monstrous. In the brief treatment 
in the Social Contract^ he tells us that war 
is " a relation of things, not men, " a relation "in 
which individuals are enemies only accident- 
ally, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as 
soldiers; not at all as members of a fatherland, 
but as its defenders. " The paragraph in which 
this theme was to have been developed in 
DHat de guerre was apparently not written, 
but the definition of war which he does give 
is quite in harmony: "War of Power with 
Power" is "the effect of a mutual, constant, 
and manifest disposition to destroy the enemy 
state, or to enfeeble it by all possible means; 
this disposition reduced to act is war proper; 
when it remains without effect it is only the 
state of war." The important point is that 
war is essentially a relation of powers or 
states, and that its animosities are (or should 
be) directed only to the injury of such artificial 
bodies, — never to the destruction of men as 
human beings. 

Rules of conduct of war follow from its 
nature. War gives no rights not necessary to 
its end. "In open war a just prince seizes all 
that belongs to the public; but he respects 
the person and the goods of individuals: he 
respects those rights upon which his own are 
founded. "^ It may be imagined that Rousseau 

* Contrat Social, I, iv.; italics mine. 
85 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

gives short shrift to the 'might makes right' 
formula: all it can mean is the annihilation 
of right. 

And here we are brought again to the fun- 
damental note upon which the whole of Rous- 
seau's thought turns. Right is somehow ele- 
mental, not perhaps in man as man, but 
certainly in man as humane. It is the true 
expression of man's political nature, and no 
polity which balks its expression is good. By 
its nature, as founded in reason, it is capable 
of defeat or perversion; but properly nurtured 
it is the greatest of blessings vouchsafed mor- 
tals; compared with the man who is in the 
highest sense politic, the moralless natural 
man is vacantly brutish. "The passage from 
the state of nature to the civil state" — there 
are few passages in Rousseau finer than this — 
"produced in man a very remarkable change, 
substituting in his conduct justice for instinct, 
and giving to his actions the morality which 
hitherto they had wanted. It is then only that, 
the voice of duty succeeding to physical im- 
pulse and right to appetite, man, who up to 
then had regard only for himself, found him- 
self forced to act upon other principles, and to 
consult his reason before listening to his in- 
clinations. Although in this state he deprived 
himself of many advantages which he held 
from nature, he gained others so great — his 
faculties developed, his ideas broadened, his 
sentiments ennobled, his whole soul elevated — 
that, if the abuse of this new condition were 

86 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

not often to degrade him below that whence 
he had issued, he ought to bless without ceas- 
ing the happy moment which had seized him 
up once for all, and, from a stupid and limited 
animal, had made of him an intelligent being 
and a man." 

Rousseau, like Dante, saw in the state a 
source of salvation; but with Rousseau this 
salvation must be won, not by miracle from 
above, but by grace of human reason and the 
sense of right: and to the fatherland which 
encourages the exercise of the one and insists 
upon the responsibilities of the other, he felt 
that the citizen should return every service of 
patriotism. I must be forgiven one more quo- 
tation, because it is so splendidly pertinent 
to our day and hour: "We begin properly to 
become men only after having been citizens: 
whence may be seen what should be thought 
of those pretended cosmopolites who, justify- 
ing their love of country by their love of 
humankind, vaunt love of the world in order 
to obtain the privilege of loving no one. " 

VI 

In the cycle of thought Rousseau's position 
stands clear. He is a humanist and a rational- 
ist, and in genius he is nearer akin to Plato 
and Aristotle than to any other thinker. Be- 
cause he is a humanist, he is a democrat; 
but his rationalism leads him to avoid the 
great pitfall of democracy — individualism 

87 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

of passion and desire. Like other democrats 
of his time, he stands for the rights of man; 
but the man he has in mind is the political 
man, whose right is in the exercise of his rea- 
son. It is in reason (not in passion) that men 
have a life in common and a common will 
directed to the ends that reason defines. This 
community (let me repeat) of self and will — 
moi comviun, volonte generale — is no mystical 
or sacramental spirit from the skies: it is 
something that belongs to each man in sever- 
alty, by reason of that participation in the 
work of society which develops his own social 
powers. And Rousseau is quite as indifferent 
as Plato to the actualization of Utopia; if 
the society be such as to give the citizen a 
vision of the ideal city — so that he can order 
his own house after the manner of that city — 
it will have achieved its high purpose. The 
society which does this, which reveals to the 
actual citizen an ideal citizen whose conduct 
can be the pattern of his own, is the essential 
democracy. 

The ideas of Rousseau have inspired much 
in political thinking and not a little in con- 
duct. Have the possibilities of his teachings 
been exhausted.^ A slight examination of the 
progress of democracy will instruct us. In the 
century and a half since Rousseau's day, 
democracies have multiplied in number, but 
they have not deepened in understanding. 
In many particulars the development has been 
away from a rational individualism and in 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

the direction of an anarchic indlviduaUsm. 
Hedonism in ethics (in its utilitarian form) 
has become well-nigh universal; and hedon- 
ism, which makes of feeling the good, is utterly- 
destructive of rational morality, and hence of 
a polity whose genius is right. Even m.ore 
perniciously irrational (since it is the covert 
support of all hedonism) has been the doctrine 
of laisser faire, as applied to society. Two 
great and gratuitous assumptions — of the 
beneficence of free competition in the economic 
world and of the beneficence of a free struggle 
for existence in the biological world — have 
m.2i6.Q laisser faire theories seem plausible. But 
the law of supply and demand and the law of 
the survival of the fittest are both mechanical; 
both, therefore, persuade to the abrogation 
of reason. To what depths of immorality the 
latter law can lead, the orgies of Machtpol'itik 
in our own day reveal. Undoubtedly, the un- 
derlying optimistic belief in the inevitableness 
of human progress toward the good, born with 
the eighteenth century and carried over 
through the nineteenth, is what has made these 
assumptions so convincing. Rousseau, at any 
rate, suffered no illusion on this point; he saw 
with perfect clarity that the agencies which 
may lead to human betterment, not only can 
contribute, but too often have contributed to 
man's debasement: only by diligence of the 
reason can we save ourselves from the peril. 
In yet another particular we have missed a 
truth which Rousseau saw. It is quite appar- 

89 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

ent that the EnHghtenment, in the flush of its 
humanitarian zeal, over-emphasized native 
human goodness. This was a not unnatural 
reaction from the elder theological condemna- 
tion of man. To us (booked in anthropology) 
there is more humour than poetry in eigh- 
teenth-century vignettes of poor Lo; but it 
is hale to recall that in a preceding century 
Paul III felt it necessary to issue a bull pro- 
claiming that American Indians are men, and 
not brutes. Under nineteenth-century scru- 
tiny the image of the Arcadian savage has 
dissolved, and, indeed, doctrinaires of evo- 
lution have swung the pendulum too far, 
picturing primitive man as worse and lower 
than he probably merits. But evolutionary 
teaching has left him at least in potentia hu- 
mane, and it is on this potentiality that we 
have erected a humanitarianism that is 
mawkishly false. It is directed not only to 
every kind of man, but to every individual, 
no matter what his case; and it is occupied 
with the prepossession that the world, in some 
sort, 'owes' to each individual his measure of 
private gratification. This is what democracy 
is commonly understood to stand for. Rous- 
seau, with his conception of the rigour of 
duty, and, before all, with his understanding 
that society exists not for the individual 
mortal, but for the type of citizen, — with this 
understanding, is clearly out of such webs of 
sentimentality. His response to the issue is 
again an exhortation to the reason, which 

90 



ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM 

makes of law an expression of the universal 
and generalizes the will itself. 

Clearly Rousseau's polity has no more been 
tried out than has Plato's, — which it so re- 
sembles. But for us to-day — in a welter of 
thought hardly less tragic than is that of 
events — there is an imperative question, 
upon answer to which hangs the possibility of 
moving further in the direction of democracy. 
Is the humanitarian view metaphysically 
true.^ Can reason be trusted? Is human 
morality and right more than illusion? There 
is a great sector of humanity fighting squarely 
in the negative belief, still asserting the ancient 
contention that there is no help save in di- 
vinity and no right save the divine right of 
the chosen. For us who have grown up to 
abhor this belief it is easy to refute it with 
prejudice; but the only refutation that can be 
lastingly persuasive must come through the 
discovery, by democracies, of a means to rear 
a rationally intelligent citizenship, each mem- 
ber thereof patterning after the universal 
model which their combinedly instructed wills 
shape for all. 

August, igij. 



91 



TRIAL BY COMBAT AND 
THE TRIBUNAL OF GOD 



I 

A REMARKABLE book is being read 
to-day in France. It is called Uex- 
pansio7t de V Alleniagne^ and its author 
is a Frenchman, Captain Henri Andrillon. 
The book, which was published shortly before 
the War, is an earnest effort to gauge the 
forces, physical and moral, which underlie the 
threat of German domination, and by analysis 
of the peril to forearm the author's country- 
men to meet it. Captain Andrillon is a loyal 
soldier and patriot. His style is detached and 
dispassionate; he lets his facts speak for 
themselves, or, if he deals with theories and 
deductions, he presents them with a logical 
directness that leaves the impression of a 
philosophic indifference to all save the truth. 
There is no atmosphere of the tribune about 
Captain Andrillon, no political extravagance, 
no flushed and noisy chauvinism; he writes 
as, since the War has come, Frenchmen have 
shown us they can fight: quietly and with 
a head for the business in hand. On the 
whole. The Expansion of Germany seems to 
me the fair counterpart of Germany and the 

Q2 



TRIAL BY COMBAT 

Next War^ and Captain Andrillon himself a 
good Gallic equivalent for General von Bem- 
hardi. 

On the physical and historical side of Cap- 
tain Andrillon's argument, I shall not dwell. 
He picture's Germany's material preparations 
for war, military and economic, and he ana- 
lyzes astutely her diplomatic policies looking 
to the same end. But all of these he very 
properly subordinates to the conscious and 
highly developed moral ideal of which they 
are but the outward symptom. The key to 
recent German history is German sentiment, 
as he sees it; and he finds this sentiment to be 
curiously well organized and united. 

With the main features of the morality 
which Captain Andrillon depicts we had al- 
ready become familiar. At its foundation 
lies that belief in the natural superiority of the 
Germanic race and of Germanic institutions 
to other races and institutions, whose political 
expression is Pan-Germanism. Our author 
cites the German historian Giesebrecht: 
"Dominion belongs to Germany because she 
is a chosen nation, a noble race, to whom it 
falls to act toward her neighbours as is the 
right and duty of all men endowed with more 
spirit or force to act upon surrounding indi- 
viduals less well endowed"; and he quotes 
again from one of the leaders of Pan-Ger- 
manism, Herr Schonerer: "We are not only 
men, we are more, because we are Teutons, 
because we are Germans." This belief re- 

93 



TRIAL BY COMBAT 

ceived, as it were, Its official sanction in the 
utterances of the reigning Kaiser: "The 
genius of Germany aspires to the empire of 
the world," he said in 1902; and in 1907: 
"The German people will be the block of 
granite upon which Our Lord can raise and 
complete the civilization of the world. Then 
will be realized the word of the poet: 

" An deutschem Wesen 

" Wird einmal noch die Welt genesen." 

Very likely William II was thinking, in 
these utterances, of the peaceful conquests of 
commerce and science quite as much as of the 
triumphs of war, but the background of the 
thought is clearly that of a people whose 
* national industry is war,' as has been said 
of Prussia. "The great questions of the time," 
Bismarck had said in 1862, "will not be de- 
cided by talk or by the decisions of majori- 
ties . . . but by iron and blood." And this 
dogma of iron and blood became the marrow 
of Germany's aggressive sentiment. Its out- 
ward dress, however, was still cast in the form 
of a moral philosophy. The simplest state- 
ment of it is the phrase of Deputy Schwerin 
in the Prussian Chamber in 1863, summariz- 
ing Bismarck's policy: Macht geht vor Recht 
— "Might before Right; say what you will, 
we have the power and we will put our theory 
into practice. " But this simple form was too 
baldly blunt for philosophic Germany. It 
required that parodoxical air of thought which 
Nietzsche brought to the problem of conduct 

94 



TRIAL BY COMBAT 

really to make the idea carry. Neitzsche, 
with his theory of the superb Uebermensch 
(that "great blond Beast" in which every 
Teuton must perforce see his own idealized 
self) magnificently appropriating whatever is 
desirable of the world's good, — Nietzsche, 
with his Superman, supplied just the needed 
image to make the philosophic German realize 
his mighty destiny. And Captain Andrillon 
finds the beginning and the end, the alpha 
and omega, of the German ideal in that phrase 
which Nietzsche had designed for the title of 
an unfinished book: "The Will to Power" 
the will to rule, cost what it may. 

II 

But it is not in the substance of the German 
ideal, as Captain Andrillon sees it, nor even 
in its truthfulness as representing the senti- 
ment of the German people, that I am pri- 
marily interested, but rather in the lesson 
which he draws from it for his own France. 
The world is moved, history is made, he says, 
by ideals; it is ideals that engender the power 
which moulds nations out of peoples. Thus 
France, the French nationality of to-day, is 
the creation of the humanitarian ideal of the 
eighteenth century. The belief that all men 
are born free and equal, the belief in the natu- 
ral rights and dignity of the individual, the 
belief in the brotherhood of mankind: these 
were the great tenets of the humanitarian 

95 



TRIAL BY COMBAT 

school. "The heroic revolution of 1879 was 
born of a dream of Liberty, Equality, and 
Fraternity, common to all Frenchmen," says 
Captain Andrillon; and in this dream the 
French nation still lives: the Frenchman still 
puts his humanity above his nationality, his 
manhood above his citizenship. 

Is this dream, is this humanitarianism, an 
illusion after all? asks Captain Andrillon. 
Above all, is it as a moral ideal inferior in force 
and impetus to the German ideal, the Will to 
Power.? He answers both of these questions 
with an emphatic affirmative. The state of 
liberty, equality, and fraternity dreamed of 
by the French of 1789 was in opposition to the 
natural law of progress, as sketched by the 
Darwinian biologists. The idea of it has filled 
France with Utopian idealists and dreaming 
pacifists; like a disease they have sapped the 
manly strength of the nation, — and he more 
than hints that this disease has been cleverly 
fed and spread by German intriguers. "The 
quest of dominion, war, are the fatal conse- 
quence of human nature," he says; "... and 
in the inevitable day of conflict, though the 
pacific peoples sometimes defend themselves 
with heroism, they are invariably van- 
quished." The German ideal is of more prac- 
tical value than the French because it rests 
directly and unaffectedly upon a fundamental 
law of nature: the struggle for existence and 
the survival of the fittest. 

But while the German ideal is incontestably 
96 



TRIAL BY COMBAT 

of greater practical value than the humani- 
tarian, is it morally of more worth? — for 
Captain Andrillon well knows that there are 
men who prefer death to subjugation, or to 
preach the gospel in chains rather than to 
abjure the faith. Nevertheless, even in this 
regard the Germans have the better of it. 
It is a great error, he says, to deny to force a 
moral value, or to place the two things in 
opposition to one another, as is so often done 
in France: force against right, justice against 
force. History shows us that "in all evolution 
the triumphs of progress are only the triumphs 
of force; in the social life in particular, the 
collectivities which have survived are the 
collectivities militarily, economically, intel- 
lectually and morally the most perfect, the col- 
lectivities which have best known how, at 
the opportune moment, to assemble all their 
forces and give to them an invincible power; 
these have survived, and they have survived 
because this was justice, because they have had 
not the power but the right. History shows us 
that if there has never been right without 
force, there has equally never been durable 
force without right, nor veritable right that 
has not ended by acquiring the force necessary 
for its triumph. " 

"To be sure," he continues, "we must 
recognize that the German point of view is 
not irreproachable from a philosophic and 
moral point of view; the rule of the strongest, 
the survival of the fittest, war: all these create 

97 



TRIAL BY COMBAT 

for the weak, and indeed for all humanity, a 
dolorous destiny. But if this ideal satisfies 
neither the reason nor the sensibility of the 
honest man, this is because he is not in har- 
mony with the necessities of universal life, 
and because the realities of the universe are 
not themselves in perfect accord with all the 
dreams of the spirit and all the desires of the 
heart. This ideal fails to satisfy us because 
universal evolution, if it has rationality, has 
such a rationality as neither the intellect nor 
the heart of man may know. And inasmuch 
as it is not given to men to change the nature 
of things, inasmuch as the will to live peace- 
ably is incompatible with the will to live, there 
can be only one moral law possible for those 
great peoples who do not wish to succumb in 
the universal struggle: that of effort with a 
view to the possession of force." 

It is on these grounds that Captain An- 
drillon urges his native France to abandon 
her humanitarian tradition, and to adopt as 
her own that Will to Power in whose Ger- 
manic manifestation her existence lies threat- 
ened. 

Ill 

I have dwelt upon Captain Andrillon's 
book for the reason that it gives such a clear 
and contrasting picture of the ideals which 
are the stake in the Great War. It presents, 
too, the spectacle of a highly intelligent and 

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thoroughly sincere man deciding against the 
ideals which have been the tradition of Euro- 
pean civilization and which his own nation 
has brought to their fullest expression. Pa- 
triotism, philosophy, his own sense of honour, 
are obviously hurt by this decision, but reason 
and the truth of the world as he sees it will not 
permit of any other conclusion: the slow cen- 
turies which have cumulatively pitted the 
conceptions of law, justice, and humanity 
against the doctrine of force, have been wrong, 
he decides; they have only served to imperil 
the civilization they express; ere it be too late 
let us advert to the simple and brutal maxim 
that ^ might makes right,' and save what we 
cherish by forcing our way into the ranks of 
the mighty. 

No word of mine is needed to point how 
directly such a conversion affects our own 
higher interests. We have been educated in 
the belief in the superiority of law and justice 
to mere force, in a kind of religious venera- 
tion for democracy and humanity. Have we 
been blindly, nay, perilously so educated? 
Are our ideals, social, national, philosophical, 
all founded in error and delusion.'' Are they 
all fraught with the peril of false security and 
poisoned with self-destruction .f* Is Darwinism 
true of human society as well as of the bestial 
world .f* Is Nietzsche's Will to Power to be the 
fundamental moral maxim, the Golden Rule, 
of the culture of the future? Are we to erect 
his Uebermensch, his "great blond Beast," 

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as the image of human salvation to replace 
the Christus crucifixus ? Doubtless to many of 
us the issue seems too preposterous for serious 
discussion; but it is no part of safety tO' avert 
the gaze from present dangers. Pitiless neces- 
sity demands of us that we play the part of 
men, and face the truth, however pitiless. 

IV 

As I read Captain Andrillon's book, I 
thought of Plato and the Platonic Socrates, 
and of the great arguments about justice in 
which Plato makes such easy disposal of the 
Sophists who in his day were saying that 
power is the greatest good and that the only 
right is the right of the stronger, — for there 
were plenty of Nietzsches in the Athens of 
Pericles and Creon. Was it too easy, Plato's 
answer to Callicles and Thrasymachus, — too 
easy to be true.^ And the great tradition of 
law and justice which rings back to Plato's 
voice, is it, also, wrong .^ Are we deceived 
about God? 

Plato's doctrine of justice has the grandeur 
of simplicity. In states and societies, justice, 
as he views it, is order and harmony: it is the 
law of simplicity in life, of restraint in ambi- 
tion, of proportionality in desire; it is the law 
that each man shall have what is his own, his 
equity in the world's good, and that the well- 
being of every man shall consist in his partici- 
pation in the well-being of the whole, — • the 

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whole state, nation, humanity. But this jus- 
tice of states, Plato held, is only the external 
manifestation of that prior justice which is 
the harmony of man's soul. Justice within the 
soul is a proportionality of the virtues, of 
courage and temperance and wisdom; it is 
the health and beauty and well-being of the 
soul, just as injustice is the soul's disease and 
weakness and deformity; truth is its armour 
and love of truth its defence. 

But of what good is this law-and-order 
justice, of what profit, if a man perish .f' This 
is the reiterant sophistic question; What gain 
in being just, if a man die for it.^ Callicles — 
and here he gives Nietzsche's whole text — 
cites the divergence of the rule of nature and 
the rule of men's law: The rule of nature, he' 
says, is the rule of the stronger, and the good 
of nature is simply the power to gratify desire, 
and the only dishonour is to suffer helpless 
injury. The rule of men's law, on the other 
hand, is the rule of weakness; human law is 
the device of the weak to protect themselves 
against the strong, and their praise of equality 
before the law is their adulation of their own 
inferiority. In a similarly contemptuous spirit 
Nietzsche speaks of the Church which has 
made of "the love story the one real interest 
which binds all classes together," and the 
Deputy Schwerin enunciates his modern ver- 
sion of the rule of nature, — Macht geht vor 
Recht. The just man is of all men the most 
defenceless, sneers Callicles, for he will not 

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commit injustice even to save himself: "For 
suppose, my dear Socrates," he says, "that 
some one were to take you, or any one of your 
sort, off to prison, declaring that you had 
done wrong when you had done no wrong, you 
must allow that you would not know what to 
do: there you would stand, giddy and gaping, 
and not having a word to say; and when you 
went up before the court, even if the accuser 
were a poor creature and not good for much, 
you would die if he were disposed to claim the 
penalty of death." 

Socrates has three answers which he makes 
to Callicles — the three answers which are 
Plato's reply to the Sophists of all time. The 
first is an ironical retort in kind. "O my wise 
Callicles," he says, "right you say is on the 
side of might: very well then, agreeing, right 
is on the side of law and justice, for the demos 
which makes the laws enforces them against 
the few who would break and defile them; the 
consensus of mankind not only applauds jus- 
tice, but makes it powerful." This, I say, is 
irony in the mouth of Socrates; but it may 
become a very terrible and fateful reality if 
spoken by the Allied nations against that 
Germany which has so lightly flouted their con- 
ception of international right: " We will take 
you at your own rule," they may say; "the law 
of life is the law of battle; let the fit survive ! " 
But the Platonic Socrates would have stopped 
short of this, for his mind was set on other 
things. "True, O Callicles, there is a law 

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of nature which seems often at variance with 
the law of men; and it may even be that 
the law of nature will require of a man that he 
die for his humanity's sake. But of evils, 
death is not the greatest, nor are all arts but 
arts of self-preservation. Humanity requires 
of a man not that he live only, but that he live 
well; and a little of righteous living out- 
weighs all the extravagances of depravity; 
God forbid me the spectacle of the patriarch 



m vice 1 



I" 



Furthermore, — and this is Socrates' last 
point, — there is an eternity in righteousness 
which makes it stronger than any power of 
a day. In the Crito, when Socrates is in 
prison, facing death, and is urged to escape, 
he hears the laws of his country, under which 
he has been condemned, saying: "Listen, 
Socrates, to us who have brought you up. 
Think not of life and children first, and of 
justice afterwards, but of justice first, that 
you may be justified before the princes of 
the world below. . . . Depart a sufferer and 
not a doer of evil; a victim, not of the laws, 
but of men." In the Gorgias Socrates tells 
in a myth of the administration of justice by 
the lords of death. Minos and Rhadamanthus 
and Aeacus are seated in the ghostly meadows 
at the parting of the ways which lead, the one 
to grim Tartarus, the other to the Isles of the 
Blest, passing upon the souls that come before 
them the judgments of that law which is the 
justice of God. And no man, says Socrates, 

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^'who is not an utter fool and coward is afraid 
of death itself, but he is afraid of doing wrong; 
for to go to the world below having one's soul 
full of injustice is the last and worst of evils." 
The vision of Er, the son of Armenius, repeats 
the conception on a cosmic scale. There at the 
world's centre he beheld the throne of Neces- 
sity, upon whose knee rests the spindle-whorl 
of the universe; beside her are the white- 
robed Fates, Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos, 
spinning out the threads of men's destinies, 
which are the threads of eternal justice. 

Plato's images in these tales are the images 
of pagan myth, but his meaning is the mean- 
ing which after him the whole Christian world 
avowed as its creed: that the issues of human 
history and the struggles of men's souls are 
not decided by the triumphs of a day, but 
come for their final appraisement before the 
tribunal of God. 

V 

But Plato, the idealist, and Socrates, the 
martyr, are these after all the men who are 
to set for us measures of conduct.^ In a world 
where Realpolitik is so often and so bitterly 
asserted can we afford to rest our causes with 
the dim justifications of eternity.? Men's lips 
do full oft eloquently belie their deeds: the 
praise of virtue is easier than her service; 
the hands of the mighty are seldom clean, and 
the wrath of the Lord is long delayed. We 

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have a number of harsh maxims: a bird in 
hand; might makes right; necessity knows no 
law, — wisdom at its kernel, won in the hard- 
ship of living. Is it not best to stick to the safe 
and sure realities — unpleasant as they may 
be — for what we shall do, if not for what we 
shall praise? 

History has given us at least a partial an- 
swer, and in Plato's favour. The whole fabric 
of European civilization rests for its support 
upon the structure of Roman law. And this 
law, not only in spirit but in source, goes back 
to Plato for its crucial definitions. Jus est ars 
boni et aequi, law is the art of the good and the 
fair, — the equitable, as we say: this is Celsus' 
phrase for that external bond which unites 
men in formal societies; and Ulpian it is who, 
in the very image of Plato, defines justice as 
"the constant and perpetual will to render to 
everyone his right and due." Law is the art 
of discovering the good; and justice is the 
soul's self-mastery: these are the sentiments 
which the Platonic Socrates is forever advo- 
cating, and they are the principles which 
Roman law made into the foundation of a 
world-civilization. 

And law with the Romans, while in the 
beginning it represented the narrowly national 
institutions of the city of Rome, in the end 
came to be the statement of the rights of man. 
Beyond the boundaries of the jus civile, the 
law of the city, the Roman jurist recognized 
a jus gentium, sanctioned by the customs of 

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mankind, and yet beyond this a jus naturale, 
grounded in the eternal nature of men as 
human beings, in the divinely implanted 
instincts of mankind; by the law of the city 
and even by an international law of races a 
man might be held as a slave, but by the un- 
dying law of human nature man was born free. 
It is no matter of wonder that such a concep- 
tion of law should have made possible the 
establishment of progressive states, or that 
mediaeval thinkers should have identified the 
jus naturale with the law of God, or that it 
should have suggested to thinkers of a later 
day the great doctrine of the rights of man, 
— a doctrine in whose heredity our own na- 
tion was born. 

But it would be unfair and untrue to say 
that this is the sole conception of law which 
has been and is being tried out by European 
civilization. For the states of Western Europe 
have grown up in the barbarian and feudal 
law of the Germanic conquerors of the Ro- 
mans, as well as in the Roman law. The 
essence of this Germanic law is the privilege 
of the strong. In the Salic code the fine for 
slaying a Roman is half that for slaying a 
Frank, and in the Anglo-Saxon code of Aethel- 
berht the wite for slaying a carl is only six per 
cent of that for a freeman's murder. The 
whole principle of feudal law is the subser- 
vience of the weak to the strong; the feudal 
hierarchy took form as the expression of the 
need of the feeble for protection against the 

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powerful and the rapacious. A man was not 
his own man, nor, as under Roman law, a 
state's citizen, but he was his lord's man; and 
his whole place in society was determined by 
his overlord's personal ascendancy. Cor- 
respondingly, rights were mainly the rights 
of the suzerain, natural rights which the 
vassal had surrendered in seeking protection. 
Even in its noblest embodiment, in the law of 
chivalry, the strong is still the protector of the 
weak, and the righteousness of the cause of 
the afflicted damosel lay ever at the peril of 
the uncertain strength of her knight's right 
arm. The whole essence of the law is the privi- 
lege of the strong. No historic contrast could 
be sharper, I imagine, than that of the Greek, 
with his love for the rhetorical pleadings of 
the courts, or the Roman with his passion for 
reasoned justice, with the Teuton's dull sus- 
picion of verbal laws and decisions and his 
hardy determination to fight out his differ- 
ences, man to man. 

VI 

And it is just this contrast which is to-day 
presented to us in the new guise of inter- 
national relations. Within civilized states the 
principles of Roman law and Greek justice 
have come to be the recognized principles of 
social organization; citizens no longer go 
about with sidearms; and the last resort of 
the code of honour and the duel is i.n the 

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military caste of militaristic empires. But in 
the external relations of states with states no 
similar development has as yet been achieved. 
To be sure there are customs of nations, un- 
certain in definition and frail in observance, 
which have been honoured with the name of 
International Law; but the only sanction that 
can give validity to such a law niust be a 
general agreement as to what constitutes the 
natural right of humanity; international law, 
if it is to prevail, must found itself in a con- 
vincing philosophy of nature, just as the jus 
gentium of the Romans was founded m their 
conception of the jus naturale. 

And what philosophy of nature will inodern 
peoples and modern nations find convincing? 
Will it be the Darwinian law of the battle of 
life, and the righteous survival of the blood- 
letter, strong in thews or strong in craft.? 
Will it be the law of the unthinking beasts, 
applied, as Nietzsche would apply it, to think- 
ing men and thinking nations,— a Kultur- 
krieg, knowing no rule but its own necessities 
and no need but conquest? The thing seems 
to me monstrous and horrible, with the very 
monstrosity and horror of that Titanism which 
the Greeks threw back into the dim and law- 
less era of Earth's parturitions. And yet it 
is the very principle upon which RealpoUtik 
rests; the very principle which Captain An- 
drillon, coolly convinced of its truth, urges 
his own countrymen to adopt in place of their 
hereditary doctrine of the lights of man; the 

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very principle which to-day is being tried out 
in Europe by combat, in the ancient Ger- 
manic fashion. 

But to save us from this, what substitute 
can be offered that will actively appeal to the 
truth-loving intelligence? Darwinism has 
taken a terrible toll of men's faith, and surely 
this is because it has at its core a convincing 
truth. Aye, truth it has; and Captain An- 
drillon is right when he says that "the reali- 
ties of the universe are not in perfect accord 
with all the dreams of the spirit and all the 
desires of the heart." He is right: nature and 
human nature, fact and reason, passion and 
intellect, are often out of accord with one 
another. Plato saw this with unwavering 
eyes, and he made it the compass of his phil- 
osophy: nought is more certain, he held, than 
the conflict of sense and idea; nought is more 
sure than the imperfection of unredeemed 
nature; nought is more inevitable than the 
partial defeat of justice in the world of affairs. 
And yet, he maintained, justice alone is worth 
living for; justice alone represents the godlike 
in man's soul; and whatever the cost in serv- 
ice, be it life itself, justice is the only secure 
possession which a man's soul may bring 
before the tribunal of God. 

I have said that the progress of civilization, 
in spite of momentary surrenders, has been 
in the support of Plato. Nothing shows this 
more steadily than the roll of the world's 
heroes. These are not the Caesars and Napo- 

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Icons of history, not the Supermen of War; 
but they are men who, like Socrates, feared 
the laws of death more than the laws of life, 
and so preferred to live well rather than to 
live long. Socrates, Giordano Bruno, St. 
Peter and St. Paul, Jesus of Nazareth, — such 
are the nobles of our race, whose very names 
cause the hearts of men to beat high with the 
pride of manhood; and in the tale of the cen- 
turies they have been justified in the emula- 
tions of their disciples long after the empires 
of the warlords have dissolved and vanished. 
But there is still a question: Can the law 
which we apply to human individuals be ap- 
plied also to human states .f" Can the law of 
justice ever become international, so that a 
state, a nation, even a race and civilization, 
may prefer death to dishonour.'' So far as the 
internal aifairs of nations are concerned, the 
scale has turned in favour of Plato, in favour 
of human nature as against Titanism and 
brute nature, and not all the dogma of Darwin 
and Nietzsche can reverse it: but is this true 
also of nations .''... One cannot answer 
the question simply, for the world is at 
war over it; and however the die falls, no 
man knows what creed, whether the creed of 
passion, or the creed of reason, will be in the 
blood of the victor. But I can point to one 
great and undeniable triumph of the spirit of 
justice eternal, which the War has already 
created. Heroic Belgium, choosing defeat that 
is well-nigh death rather than the fatness and 

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TRIAL BY COMBAT 

ease of a dishonoured servitude, is the very 
image among the nations of to-day of those 
quahties which have heretofore given us heroes 
among men. "What our geographical frontiers 
will be tomorrow I know not," writes the 
Abbe Noel in an article on the Soul of Bel- 
gium. " But I do know that our moral position 
in the world will henceforth be other than it 
was. In the most terrible crisis of history we 
have suddenly found ourselves confronted by 
a duty which we little expected. Yet, nour- 
ished as it was in reverence for right, the 
nation understood without a moment's hesi- 
tation, and as one man, that this duty was 
sacred, and instantly grappled it with all the 
energy of its loyal and believing soul. In 
presence of brutal aggression the old instinct 
of freedom asserted itself with the energy of 
other days, and Belgium, hardly perceiving 
what had happened, was plunged into a world- 
war for right and for liberty. She it is who 
personifies this cause, and to her has fallen 
the honour of suffering martyrdom on its 
behalf. She lies wounded, panting, but fight- 
ing on. All the nations bend over her with 
their love and veneration. Tomorrow, when 
Force shall have yielded to Justice, B-^lgium 
will cherish the right to speak and to act in 
the new world which is coming to birth. " 

So writes the Abbe Noel; and whatever 
may be the immediate outcome of the present 
trial by combat, do we not feel assured in our 
hearts that he speaks the living truth as it 

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TRIAL BY COMBAT 

will be pronounced in the final judgment before 
the tribunal of God? 

Aprils igij. 



112 



JUSTICE AND PROGRESS 



THE conception of justice is grounded in 
the compromise of conflicting ends. It 
arises in the midst of a many, out of the 
bendings and insistencies of more or less antag- 
onistic wills; indeed, justice is the essential 
virtue and the proper excellence of a plural- 
istic world. Whether it be regarded as an 
equality of privileges or of rewards, or,_ with 
Plato, as a harmony of interests, justice in 
every case gets its meaning from adjustments 
of real or putative dissensions: the just judge 
is a mediator of mutually exclusive aims; the 
just man is one who is able to subject his own 
will to a reason which can see eye to eye with 
his fellows. 

Thus, adjustment, harmonization, con- 
cordance, are the product and character of 
active justice; while its correlative passive 
quality is the virtue of obedience, — obedi- 
ence to law, human or divine, the recognition 
and observance of rights. Each of these 
qualities, active adjustments ajid passive 
obedience, implies surrender or at least devia- 
tion of purpose and aim. They are qualities 
which presuppose a unity not completely 
unified, an organism not yet perfected, within 

113 



JUSTICE AND PROGRESS 

which discontinuous interests actively quarrel 
or passively succumb. 

Obviously, the conception of justice is 
founded in the recognition of conflicting in- 
terests, conflicting ends and aims. So also 
the adjudications in which justice finds its 
expression are adjudications of ends and aims. 
The whole idea falls within the domain of 
teleology, and clearly its interpretation must 
be teleological. 

Yet here there enters in a nice distinction. 
The teleology of which justice is the form is 
not of the simple and elegant philosophical 
type; it does not represent a direct playing 
of the imperfect reality into the perfect pat- 
tern, of the hampered present into the com- 
petent future; it has no logical smoothness, no 
mathematical inevitability. Rather, its pro- 
gressions are by jolts and hitches; its wisdoms 
are insecure; and its previsions are glamoured 
with uncertainties. It is by no accident that 
the image of justice is blindfold; she is a 
fumbler in the dark after the true way. 

Let us consider the material factors of her 
activity. First, there is the conflict of ends 
and aims; and this conflict is always realistic: 
it is the result of the actual encounter of defi- 
nite projects in course of conscious execution; 
it is a matter of fact, and the factual agencies 
are concretely combative human wills, each 
with its purpose clear cut and its resources 
of thought pragmatically applied to this pur- 
pose. Second, there is the adjudication of in- 

114 



JUSTICE AND PROGRESS 

terests. But it is perfectly plain that this ad- 
judication is and can be made upon no such 
realistic grounds as condition the conflict. It 
is and must be putative in character, — that 
is, divorced from organic fact. The interests 
which the adjudication defines are not the 
conscious ends of the conscious actions of 
litigous men; they are judicially determined 
and judicially defined, — that is, in deliberate 
disregard of pragmatical states of mind. The 
adjudication expresses no end that is sought, 
but one that ought to he sought; and hence it 
becomes an expression of rights, not of facts. 
It is this peculiar separation of the judicial 
from the pragmatical mind, of the intellect 
from the will, which gives to justice its char- 
acter of uncertainty and divagation; ends are 
defined, but no impulses are created for their 
realization. 

What, then, can be the sanction of these 
abstract rights which are proclaimed to be 
the governors of conduct and whose minis- 
tration is named justice ? . . . Let us first re- 
capitulate the tokens of a right, {a) A right 
is a prospect, not a status, — moral values 
lie not in possession, but in uses, {b) It is a 
prospect which is (i) realized in no individual 
consciousness, and is, hence, ill-defined, or is 
(2) realized only in a judicial, third-party con- 
sciousness, and has, hence, no impulse to exe- 
cution, (c) It is thus essentially theoretic; it 
can never be concrete (in an active world). 
(d) And it derives its theoretic intelligibility 

"5 



JUSTICE AND PROGRESS 

just from the fact of its detachment from 
action: its sanction is abstract reason. 

The sanction of rights is reason; but we are 
obviously little advanced by such a conclusion 
unless we can show upon what foundations 
this reason establishes itself. Here it seems 
clear that we must draw our inferences, as we 
should in a science, from the usages of the 
reason involved. We must consider the custom 
of judicial thought and infer therefrom the 
logic of justice. 

From such a point of view there may be dis- 
criminated three general maxims, or axioms, 
underlying this type of thought, and forming, 
as it were, the presuppositions of the logic 
sought for. I would state these axioms as 
follows : 

1. Justicial reason must be teleological in 
form. That is, it must be concerned with final 
causes, and must be organized with reference 
to ends and aims recognized as authoritative 
by the judicial mind. This means that it must 
be temporal, historical, biological, if you like, 
in character; and conversely, it means that 
this reason cannot rest upon structural analy- 
sis of society. The legal instinct for precedent 
is warranted by the temporal character of 
justice; and it is quite fantastical to suppose 
that sociology can ever replace history in the 
interpretation of law. 

2. Justicial reason must define attainable 
ends. It is the common sense of mankind that 
a just adjudication of conflicting interests 

ii6 



JUSTICE AND PROGRESS 

must substitute for the desires denied other 
realizable desires, commended in their stead. 
It is no portion of justice to be merely nuga- 
tory; wherever it denies present attainment, 
it must point the way to new possibility. I 
am aware that vengeful or punitive justice 
might be regarded as an exception to this rule, 
but only, I think, when a partial view is taken 
of the conflict involved,— it is the irreconcil- 
ability of the wicked, rather than his wicked- 
ness, which is punished. Furthermore, the 
conception of justice as punitive disappears 
with the growth of enlightenment; and again 
it is not a little curious that society invariably 
feels that justice is better done where the 
criminal acquiesces, by confession or other- 
wise, in his own punishment. Certainly, in all 
that is fundamental, justice is conceived as a 
reformatory process, expurgating only in order 
better to create. 

3. Justicial reason rests upon the assump- 
tion that all proper desire is for the good. It 
is not enough that judicial decisions define 
ends, and ends that are attainable; they must 
also be ends felt to be good. This is without 
prejudice as to the definition of the good; for 
I think it holds for all conceptions of value. 
Historically, and for the analysis of justice, 
such conceptions might be thrown into two 
general types, of which the first finds the 
essence of goodness in mortal life and human 
ends, while the second discovers it only in the 
desire of a will for which human conditions are 

117 



JUSTICE AND PROGRESS 

transcended and mortal purposes are inci- 
dental. To the first type would belong the 
classical conception of an earthly imperium 
collectively created by mankind, as the su- 
preme good; or, again, the humanitarian 
notion of individual happiness distributively 
apportioned; or, yet more modern, the Nietz- 
schean notion of an evolutional aristogony 
producing its supermen to be the bliss of a 
new idolatry. To the second type would be- 
long all transcendental and cosmical justifi- 
cations of the world, which are so often, as is 
Neo-Platonism and Buddhism and Chris- 
tianity, pessimistic of merely mortal possi- 
bilities. But whatever the conception of good- 
ness or whatever its philosophical emplace- 
ment it is still the key to all justification; 
whether the legislator and the judge be an 
archon of an earthly city or a divine ruler of 
the universe, he must raise his eyes to the 
pattern of the good in his administration of 
justice. 

If we hold in one view these axioms of jus- 
ticial reason, — first, that it be temporal and 
teleological, second, that it define practicable 
ends, and third, that these ends be confessedly 
good, — there will emerge, I take it, the single 
philosophical assumption upon which they all 
rest. Law in human institutions is not an ex- 
pression of belief in the uniformity of human 
nature, as natural law is an expression of belief 
in the uniformity of physical nature; it is not 
an analysis of structure: rather, it is an ex- 

ii8 



JUSTICE AND PROGRESS 

pression of faith in the indefinite melioration 
of man's nature, in his progress toward per- 
fection. Whether this progress be conceived 
as a betterment of states or an evolution of 
types, as the slow round of the wheel of ex- 
istence or as a soul's parlous pilgrimage of the 
flesh, man is in every sense a viator, a wayfarer, 
whose uncertain advance is guided by the 
beacon of the Good, whose errancies are pun- 
ished by its obscuration. Rights exist only 
as special illuminations of goodness; laws only 
as guides to rectitude. And law and right and 
justice alike find their fundamental sanction, 
their ultima ratio, in the assumption of human 
progress. 

The assumption of human progress is to the 
logic of morals what the assumption of the uni- 
formity of nature is to the logic of_ science. 
Like the assumption of uniformity it is un- 
provable, and as in' the case of the assumption 
of uniformity there are many facts of experi- 
ence that appear to go against it. Both as- 
sumptions are, in fact, articles of faith; neither 
is obvious fact, and neither rests upon com- 
pelling reason. Nevertheless, each is the foun- 
dation for all the rationality that is possible in 
a whole department of human thought,— the 
assumption of uniformity in the structural 
analysis of the world, the assumption of prog- 
ress in its teleological analysis. Science and 
morals respectively are the births of these two 
great fiducial articles of thought. 

But how, it may be asked, is such a remote 
119 



JUSTICE AND PROGRESS 

generalization as faith in progress to be applied 
to the actual administration of justice in a 
concrete and contentious human society? The 
question is answered by the historic fact. Just 
as the natural sciences advance by the method 
of trial and error, hypothesis and approxima- 
tion, with the assumption of uniformity as 
their lode-star, so morals, following the hypo- 
theses of justicial reason, make their advances 
by the method of trial and error, governed by 
the constant assumption of progress. This is 
its procedure, as history shows; and while the 
meaning of good varies from age to age, so 
that it is now conceived as earthly and human, 
now as cosmical and divine, there yet is in the 
idea of progress a constant content repre- 
sented by that buoyancy of life which still 
makes effort worth while. 

Particular applications of justice are, as in 
the case of science, the consequence of par- 
ticular hypotheses. Such hypotheses of pro- 
gress, in severalty, are the rights which repre- 
sent the ends and aims recognized by the judi- 
cial consciousness of mankind as tending 
toward the good. As I have said hitherto they 
are theoretic in character, for the reason that 
the practical needs of life blind to the ulterior 
bearings of conduct; reason, whether moral 
or scientific, feels the need of detachment from 
the concrete fact. It should be said, too, that 
we are no more certain of the enduring quality 
of moral hypotheses than we are of that of 
scientific hypotheses; both are liable to ab- 

I20 



JUSTICE AND PROGRESS 

solute error; the enthusiastic rights of one 
generation may be Utopian fancies to the 
next. 

Nevertheless, there is in actuality some ob- 
jective validation of rights. Putatively, ends 
may be as many as there are individuals in 
the world; actually no such anarchy is the 
case. It is means rather than ends that com- 
monly vary, instrumental rather than final 
goods; all men desire Fortune, but the modes 
of wooing her are as many as there are men. 
If we ignore eccentricities in moral science 
as we do in physical science, the number of 
rights which men actually recognize will be 
found to be surprisingly few: a simple Decla- 
ration will sum them up for a group of cen- 
turies. 

Laws and institutions are the reflections 
of such hypothetical rights in historical hum.an 
societies. Human laws do not state pro- 
cedures, as do natural laws, but purposes, — 
such purposes as have become, as it were, 
phenomenally realized. Sometimes a law may 
outlast its realization, and survive as a form 
or rote which is socially dead; and this chance 
is no doubt the source of the legalist's repu- 
tation for dry-as-dust conservatism; but the 
essential function of the laws of a state is to 
express the norm of progress, as conceived in its 
day and generation. 

Thus laws, which are the forms of the ad- 
ministration of justice, rest upon rights, 
which are the theoretic aims of justice; and 

121 



JUSTICE AND PROGRESS 

law and right and justice are all subsumptions 
of that general faith in progress which is to 
moral science what faith in uniformity is to 
natural science. Corollary to this: there is a 
hierarchy of rights being defined by the course 
of history which leads logically to an essential 
right as the theoretic end of progress; and 
similarly, there is a hierarchy of laws ex- 
pressing the structure of social evolution, and 
leading (for the mind shrewd enough to dis- 
cover it) to some law of progress as universal 
as is the law of gravitation. The business of 
the legal historian is to reconstruct the desires 
which underlie the lawsof thepast ; the business 
of the legal philosopher is to divine the at- 
tainable good which will satisfy man's instinct 
for progress; while the business of the judge 
is to weigh contemporary hypotheses of right 
in the light of past desire and attainable good, 
and pronounceupontheirmoral truth or falsity. 
Can we define justice in a more individual 
sense, as what is due to this man or that.f* 
Clearly, it is the individuaV s equity in human 
progress. The formula may seem vague, but 
I think that it should not be found unfruitful 
either as a principle of law or a maxim of 
legislation. At least it points out that justice 
belongs primarily to man's theoretic nature, 
that it must find its satisfactions, not in the 
gratification of the passional or the appetitive, 
soul, but in that of the intellective. Only 
when life and life's situations are made reason- 
able to men is justice done. 

122 



JUSTICE AND PROGRESS 

Finall)'^, if to what I have had to say it 
should be objected that I have added little to 
Plato's idea of justice, I would only reply that 
there is little to add. 

December, 1914. 



123 



AMERICANISM 



FOUR great historical documents, mark- 
ing progressive epochs in our national 
history, give the essential definition of 
Americanism in politics. First is the Declara- 
tion of Independence, signed July 4, 1776, 
proclaiming the principles by which the United 
States justify their independence of European 
domination. Second is President Monroe's 
message to Congress, of December 2, 1823, 
announcing the right of the peoples of the 
Western Hemisphere to pursue their political 
destinies without interference from Old World 
powers. Third is Lincoln's memorial address 
at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863, in which 
the rights of Americans to their own conti- 
nents are affirmed to be inalienably democrat- 
ical, and without democracy to be forfeit. 
Fourth is the message delivered by President 
Wilson at the joint session of the two Houses 
of Congress, April 2, 1917, asserting the value 
of the democratical polity to the whole terri- 
torial world and the right to it of the entire 
human race. 

These documents are not themselves causes 
of political conduct in any primary sense. 
Rather, each is a summary of contemporary 

124 



AMERICANISM 

political conviction, — from which fact arises 
the height of their significance as expression 
of the political faith of America. It is cer- 
tainly true that this faith has been clarified 
and invigorated by the fine intelligence of the 
expression; for more than to any other form 
of state, public intelligence is necessary to 
democracy. Nevertheless, as in every other 
form of state, the final sanction of govern- 
ment is the faith of the citizen, which is the 
impulse for that conduct whereof, in democ- 
racies, intelligence alone can set the pattern. 
The patterns of Americanism are its public 
utterances, with the four that have been men- 
tioned in the stations of preeminence. 

Out of each of these documents may be 
chosen phrases which serve as texts of their 
fuller meaning. "All men are created equal 
. . . unalienable rights . . . life, liberty, and 
the pursuit of happiness": this is the core of 
the Declaration of Independence, voicing in 
eighteenth-century speech that belief of demo- 
crats in men's right to the self-responsible 
making of their own laws which is fundamental 
in our polity. It is true that this formal mean- 
ing of the pronouncement has received many 
material alterations in the course of a century 
of history (though none, certainly, that 
weaken the strength of the form).; and among 
them, not the least, a vast extension of the 
meaning of "all men" and a profound com- 
plexification of the doctrine of "rights." The 
men who signed the Declaration, though their 

125 



AMERICANISM 

minds were broad with the morning, were yet 
but conscious rebels. What they felt was less 
the tyranny of the Old World than the inde- 
pendence of the New, and what they de- 
manded was the right of free experimentation 
in lands unspoiled. The true foundation of 
the rights of man as they knew them was 
their own self-confidence in their own political 
sagacity. The beginning of American liberty 
was the commanding acceptance of respon- 
sibility. 

The Declaration proclaimed America's right 
to try out Democracy; the Monroe Doctrine 
proclaimed both the success of the experi- 
ment and the belligerent intention to broaden 
its territorial marches. " The American conti- 
nents^ by the free and independent condition 
which they have assumed and maintain^ are 
henceforth not to be considered as subjects 
for future colonization by any European 
powers." The italicized phrase is the import- 
ant one: it proclaims again the acceptance of 
responsibility, no longer for experiment, but 
for huge expansion. The Monroe Doctrine, in 
effect, established a greater Mason and 
Dixon's line, having the natural seas for its 
delineations. Unless history shall show greater 
consequences from President Wilson's war 
message, it is the most ambitious political 
proclamation ever made effective. In its own 
consciousness the United States was no longer, 
as De Tocqueville and other sympathetic Eu- 
ropeans regarded it, merely an unexpectedly 

126 



AMERICANISM 

fruitful trial of precarious political theory; 
it was now confident and aggressive, with am- 
bitions outpassing the grandiosities of em- 
perors, — and incidentally and immediately, 
defying emperors and their ambitions; for the 
direct occasion of Monroe's message was the 
threat of the Holy Alliance for the re-sub- 
jection of South America and the Russian 
threat of expansion in North America. The 
truly arrogant pretentiousness of the Monroe 
Doctrine is best realized when we contrast the 
sparseness of the human population in the 
Western Hemisphere with the relatively 
crowded condition of the Eastern: virtually, 
since the democratic faith was but meagerly 
represented in the Old World at that time, it 
was a demand from an insignificant minority 
among men that they be possessed of a third of 
the world. Certainly, such a demand could 
never have received any general recognition 
had it not been coupled with a free invitation 
to all European peoples to colonize America in 
every sense save the political; the convincing 
corollary to the Monroe Doctrine was the open 
door to immigrants. It may be remarked that 
the situation is not greatly changed to-day. 
The Americas are still the most sparsely pop- 
ulated of the great habitable areas of our 
globe; the Monroe Doctrine is still in force. 
But the test of its strength is to come not 
from Europe but from Asia. The real issue, 
before Americans and Europeans alike, is now 
whether, in the interests of political inde- 

127 



AMERICANISM 

pendence, the Western Hemisphere must not, 
and in fairness, open the doors of immigration 
to the Oriental. Can the Caucasian West pre- 
empt this virginal domain to the lasting exclu- 
sion of the congested East ? What is the mean- 
ing of "all men" in our Declaration? 

Lincoln's Gettysburg address represents 
cognizance of the same fundamental problem 
from the angle of internal organization; it is, 
as it were, the conscious self-measurement of 
the New World polity in the glass of its own 
ideals. The speech looks back to the nation's 
beginnings, and, in a sense, it is a final re- 
affirmation of what Monroe had before 
affirmed : that the experimental stage of 
American democracy was passed, and that 
thenceforth, bulwarked by America, "gov- 
ernment of the people, for the people, and by 
the people" should not perish from the earth. 
It affirmed this, not in view ojf external threat, 
but in the presence of internal; in effect stat- 
ing that America could not tolerate from any 
group of its own people the formation and 
perpetuation of an oligarchical or other form 
of anti-democratical state, that democracy 
alone should be free to develop in the Western 
Hemisphere, for the very reason that de- 
mocracy is imperilled by non-democratical 
neighbours. The address was, in short, an 
apostolic profession that democracy is con- 
vinced of its own righteousness, and is intol- 
erant of all dangerous rivals. 

Supporting this profession there was a pro- 
128 



AMERICANISM 

founder meaning than the ostensible one of 
territorial union and political unity. The 
meaning of "all men" still called for defini- 
tion, and Lincoln could not use the word 
"people" in any cant sense. He had long be- 
fore proclaimed that the nation could not en- 
dure half slave and half free; he well knew 
that the crux of the war was the slave ques- 
tion; and no man could have been wiselier 
conscious than he of the fact that the settle- 
ment of that question for freedom must mean 
ultimately a redefinition of "people" and a 
new conception of American citizenship. The 
United States had liberally welcomed Euro- 
peans of many tongues and complexions, who 
should be the making of its people; now it was 
ready to take into the body politic millions of 
that race which is most antipodal to the Euro- 
pean. The enfranchisement of the American 
blacks is the most heroic act of political faith 
in history. True, the problem of readjust- 
ment has none of the simplicity which the 
idealists of that time dreamed it to have; 
it is a problem that now is and will long con- 
tinue with us. But the faith that was in the 
Declaration and that forms the heart of 
Americanism to-day, faith in the civic nobility 
and therefore in the civic rights of all nature 
which we can call human, received in the 
enfranchisement of the Negroes its extreme 
attestation. From that time forward Ameri- 
cans could face the world, conscious that they 
had made themselves clean with their first 

129 



AMERICANISM 

profession. Race questions and class ques- 
tions — as distinguished from questions of 
formal politics — will long continue to vex us, 
and eventually the Mongol problem will be 
huger than the Negro; but by implication all 
of these were settled, and not only for us, but 
for all democratical peoples, when our Civil 
War came to its issue. The civic man is hence- 
forth of no preferred complexion and of no 
recognized caste, — at least, this is now a fixed 
article in our American faith in a "govern- 
ment of the people": Americanism cannot 
be for "all men" in any lesser sense than for 
"men of all kindreds." 

The Revolutionary War established the 
privilege of democracy in the New World. 
A mature generation later that privilege was 
converted into an aggressive right, balking 
the ambitious pretensions of the Caesars of 
that day in respect to the two Western con- 
tinents. Another generation matured, and 
the Civil War marked the purification of 
democracy in its own house, and a final clear- 
conscious recognition of the uttermost inten- 
tion of the term democracy. Now a third 
generation has matured and passed, and in a 
war outmeasuring all those that men have 
fought, the United States is called once more, 
not only to stand for its political faith, but to 
expand the meaning of that faith. The stand 
and the expansion have both been made, and 
(true to the genius of his nation) the President 
has given their meaning in a penetrating 

130 



AMERICANISM 

phrase. "The world must be made safe for 
democracy; its peace must be planted upon 
tested foundations of political liberty." The 
World! Here, indeed, is expansion; our globe 
has shrunk too small for democratic and 
autocratic states to subsist together, nor can 
Ocean herself constrain them in separation. 
Democracy has issued her final defiance to all 
the citadels of absolutism, proclaiming no 
longer her right to independence, nor merely 
her right to her own free field, but now her 
purposed supremacy in all fields and over all 
polities. Here is arrogance of pretension out- 
matching Monroe's, whose broad-limned 
compromise breaks futile, like the old com- 
promises of North and South. Democracy 
claims for herself no lesser thing than the 
world. 

The new declaration is fittingly accom- 
panied by a re-affirmation of the old. The 
"tested foundations of political liberty" refer 
us once again to the trial which our national 
history has given to our national faith, 
proudly asserting that we have passed the 
trial with triumph, and that the high self- 
confidence of the authors of the Declaration 
has been justified to their sons' sons. But 
more than this, the new declaration, like those 
which have preceded it, adds new meaning to 
the whole national faith. Our fight, said the 
President, is for the liberation of the world's 
peoples, " the German people included, " there- 
in asserting the right of democracy to a kind 

131 



AMERICANISM 

of spiritual colonization, even in antagonistic 
lands. The assertion of such a right, unless it 
were the deepest of convictions, could only be 
the most incredible effrontery; and if con- 
viction, it can have for its meaning naught 
save a new definition of "all men." Hence- 
forth, the word "people" must include not 
merely men of all external complexions, but 
men of all internal complexions, not merely 
men of all classes, but men of all polities, — 
and for the reason that there is but one true 
form of the true human polity, and that is the 
democratical form. The faith that underlies 
such an assumption is prodigious; and it is in 
that faith that we are fighting, for it is the 
core of Americanism. Fighting, and at the 
same time watching and listening with an 
eager and amazing confidence for the first 
signs of response from the German people; 
for the President spoke only what all Ameri- 
cans in their hearts believe, when he said that 
our war is with institutions and not people 

Americanism has received its definition in 
four great documents. Three of these have 
been issued upon the occasion of great wars, 
and the fourth, for near a century, has been as 
distinctly belligerent in character as the mailed 
list or the jangling saber. Americanism is, 
obviously, no pacifist faith. But it is, none 
the less, a faith. It is a faith vast in its pre- 
tensions beyond all dreams of autocrats; and 
it is a faith, despite its century of trial, little 
justified by what has transpired in human 

132 



AMERICANISM 

history. Yet in the face of autocrats and of 
history, it is inwardly unshaken and serene, 
reUgious in its confidence, miraculous in its 
hopes. Its foundation is something more 
constraining than experience and far more 
compelling than reason; for its foundation is 
an inner light, which for us is like a revela- 
tion, showing as in an apocalypse the common 
humanity of "all men." Americanism is a 
faith that men have died for, and that men 
are dying for to-day, — whether it be a mad- 
ness or divinity that hath touched them with 
it. 

December, 1917. 



133 



THE LIMITS OF 
TOLERANCE 



BITTER thoughts are in the minds of 
members of minorities nowadays, even 
where their lips are guarded against 
bitter words. War breeds intolerance: its 
business is stern, and its measures are severe; 
with the same harsh pressure it drafts men to 
fight and shuts the mouth of opposition; its 
high enterprise demands concentrated co- 
operation and renders at once impossible the 
social laxity and bickering normal to times of 
peace. Freedom of action, of speech, even of 
conscience, all are subjected to violent shift 
by military undertaking and its regime, and as 
a result of the shift men become suddenly and 
rawly conscious of the interference with their 
custom, — and, in democratic countries, jeal- 
ously sensitive of their rights. Dark prophets 
have long been saying that the Allies will crush 
militarism only by becoming militaristic, that 
a defeated Germany will seize the victor's iron 
and weld therefrom the fetters of civic liberty. 
Since the United States entered the war the 
ugly boding is swollen: where is our pride of 
free speech .f* Where is our tolerance of opin- 
ion.? Where is our good-humoured compan- 

134 



THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE 

ionableness and partisanship without ran- 
cour? A world 'safe for democracy' were 
hollow indeed if the safety be secured at the 
cost of that liberty of the individual which is 
democracy's soul. 

Six months of being at war — six months 
of mounting suspicions and sharpening in- 
quisition on the part of the public, of raids 
and suppressions on the part of officials, and 
of rumour of secret service astounding honest 
ears — has made every American realize the 
hitch between his peace-trained theory of the 
state's activities and its belligerent practice. 
Naturally, there have been accusations of in- 
tolerance, and preaching of tolerance; cer- 
tainly, too, suppression has produced _ can- 
kerous ingrowths of disloyalty. But, with it 
all, has there been (what a sane treatment calls 
for) that diagnosis of the powers and purposes 
of the state, in time of war, which shall enable 
us to set rational limits to tolerance, prevent- 
ing officials — through understanding — from 
overstepping their country's need, and satis- 
fying citizens of the justice of official action 
and the safety of their rights.? Assuredly, the 
symptoms call for a verdict. 

In times of peace the limits of tolerance are 
defined by custom. In democracies laws are 
made and conduct is controlled by temporary 
majorities. It is the fact that these majorities 
are temporary, that they submit their rule 
periodically and frequently to electoral tests 
that define party strength, which gives a sense 

135 



THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE 

of public fairness and insures the equilibrium 
of the state. Furthermore, the minority has 
always at its disposal certain recognized means 
of converting itself into a majority, — chief 
among them free speech and free party organi- 
zation. The system thus rests upon the 
assumption of perpetual differences — of 
' issues ' — relative to the control of the con- 
duct of citizens; and indeed, if these 'issues' 
did not exist, democratic government would 
cease. An agreement to disagree (within 
limits) is thus the very core of institutional 
democracy; and the thing we call 'demo- 
cratic tolerance' is our name for the range of 
disagreement which we normally permit. 

For tolerance, even in times of peace, has 
clear limits. There are acts and conditions 
that cannot be tolerated and society still en- 
dure. We recognize readily a human duty to 
be intolerant of, and to suppress and ex- 
tinguish even at a cost of force and blood- 
shed, crime and sin: our criminal code is the 
profession of such an intention. Less con- 
sciously, but more tyrannously, the burden of 
a public will is imposed upon the individual 
in multitudes of details of our economic and 
social life, which we bear, for the most part, 
comfortably, — as we wear collars and shoes, 
not realizing that they are fetters. All this is 
quite as it should be: if we would be men, we 
must recognize moral obligation and acqui- 
esce in social restraint. 

In time of war the latitudes of difference 
136 



THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE 

which we permit in the midst of peace are 
stringently narrowed; and it is this narrowing 
of the latitude of action to which we are ac- 
customed that stirs sensibility and arouses 
the jealous suspicion of outraged rights. Nor 
is war the only condition which entails such 
consequences; other perils, as pestilence and 
flood and even the humanly created discom- 
forts of economic strife, call for their own 
types of limitation of privilege and readjust- 
ment of rights. In them all is a certain com- 
mon character: they represent, as compared 
with the normal life of society, a sharp sim- 
plification of social ends and a great com- 
pression of social endeavour. The presence of 
peril acts immediately to define the near and 
major task of the body politic; the complex 
and divergent activities of normal times be- 
come temporarily but emphatically sub- 
ordinated to the great activity of the preserva- 
tion of their condition, and, as a consequence, 
the main force of society sweeps into a single 
channel. Small wonder if the swollen majority 
becomes tyrannous, for its effort is at once 
more intense and backed by huger power than 
in the ordinary. 

Under ordinary conditions most men will 
accept as a reasonable rule of political con- 
duct that opposition to the will of the ma- 
jority should extend to its policies, but not to 
its execution of them until the majority has 
been reversed by election. This is the rule of 
'politics,' of parliamentarism; it is the asser- 

^17 



THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE 

tion that laws are the friends of the citizen, 
or, with Aristotle, that "men should not deem 
it slavery to live under the constitution, for 
it is their salvation." This rule, from the side 
of the government in power, is equivalent to 
the statement that it will tolerate all opposi- 
tion which does not interfere with the execu- 
tion of the tasks decided upon by the ruling 
majority. In brief, the range of tolerance is 
directly proportional to the demands of effi- 
cient government. 

This is the rule of political conduct in nor- 
mal peace. In time of peril, war, or pestilence, 
it should be not different in principle, much 
as its practice must necessarily differ. But 
there is a complication. In the presence of 
pestilence there is an almost unanimous fear 
and willingness to submit to governmental 
guidance. War is man-made, and it is difficult 
to define its partisanships by national boun- 
daries. Nor is its threat so transient; there 
is fear of post-bellum alterations, modifying 
the whole order of life, — a fear, on the whole, 
justified by history. Men, therefore, do not 
submit to military regimentation with the 
same resignation with which they undergo 
sanitary regulation. Passion poisons reason; 
copperheadism develops into political disease; 
and, on the side of the government, the legiti- 
mate limitation of individual privilege in 
accordance with the needs of efficient action 
is too readily replaced by a vengeful con- 
straint, which is the only true intolerance. 

138 



THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE 

In the United States to-day we have not 
as yet come to a bad pass, either in regard to 
the draft or to free speech. The will of the 
majority is unambiguous; the causes of the 
war are generally felt as justifying causes and 
the government is generally believed to be 
honest and competent. But this is not to say 
that we have no problem, nor that it is not 
developing. There is a minority, composed of 
the resentful ignorant and the embittered 
opposition; and the majority have not in- 
variably shown the tact and judgment in the 
exercise of their prerogative which would 
diminish the resentment and the ignorance. 
Certainly, the condition is not malignant, but 
before it has the opportunity of becoming so, 
there is needed such clear thinking-out and 
clear expression of our national policies as 
shall reassure the doubting and comfort the 
opposition with respect to that one point 
in which they are entitled to assurance, — 
the preservation of their minority rights. 

The practical problem is twofold. On the 
part of the minority it calls for individual 
self-restraint. Its members should remember 
not only that they owe all citizenship rights 
to the state, but that they owe to it their 
essential humanity as well; for, as Rousseau 
shrewdly remarked, not only is man a political 
animal, but he is never truly man except as 
political. From this it follows that human 
'personal liberty' is liberty of the civic person, 
and must be defined by civic relations; and 

139 



THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE 

again it follows that that relation of communi- 
cation which is 'freedom of speech' does not 
mean the right to unlimited hearings nor to 
command of the public ear. Further, the 
member of the minority should bear in mind 
that the contract of citizenship is not lightly 
drawn; it is signed, as it were, when the first 
ballot is cast, and its terms are such (as once 
more Rousseau notes) that the citizen binds 
himself to take what punishment the rules of 
its operation may bring upon him. He will 
remember, perhaps, that such a personality 
as Socrates chose, as the lesser evil, to die under 
an unjust condemnation rather than break 
his country's laws. With such precepts and 
example he should not find conformity hard, 
— provided always that he is convinced that 
the other member to the contract is acting in 
good faith. 

The obverse of the problem is the obliga- 
tion of the majority. First and clearly, it is 
the duty of the government to be frank as to 
its policies and as free as the performance 
of its task will permit in its statement of 
current fact: news-doctoring in the interests 
of policy is the straight road to damnation, as 
Germany is illustrating. In living up to this 
duty, our government at present stands 
square; the prestige which the United States 
has attained is almost entirely due to the 
frankness with which the President has stated 
our policies. Nevertheless, there is a form 
of assurance, internal rather than external, 

140 



THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE 

which the times demand and which the gov- 
ernment has not given. War is an unusual 
national enterprise, calling for an unusual 
majority supporting the government that is 
waging it, — a majority by no means repre- 
sented by the alignment of the parties of nor- 
mal times of peace. In European democracies 
this fact has been reflected in the formation 
of coalition ministries. Our cabinet is no 
responsible ministry; nevertheless, the ob- 
vious fact that the war party in America is 
enormously bulkier than the controlling poli- 
tical faction ought to have been recognized — 
should now be recognized — by the formation 
of at least a bi-partisan cabinet, comprising 
those men of the two parties who most com- 
mand the public confidence. The reason for 
doing this — here as in Europe — is less for 
the conduct of the military enterprise than for 
the reassurance of the citizenry at home. For 
the best guarantee that our government can 
give, not only that we are engaged in war for 
no meanly political ends, but that the peace 
rights of our citizens are not to be imperilled 
by any post-bellum militarism, is the respon- 
sible participation in the national councils of 
the broadest representation possible. This 
would be a governmental pledge of faith. 

Thus the limits of democratic tolerance 
appear in the nature of democratic govern- 
ment. It is not, however, out of place to note 
that Christian charity may add a virtue of even 
political value. Christianity teaches that no 

141 



THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE 

man in the flesh is beyond hope of redemption; 
hence, it is infinitely charitable of sinners, 
though never of sin. Similarly, tolerance, as 
a virtue, extends to men, never to their mis- 
deeds; and above all, it extends to the ignor- 
ance of men. Applied to the present, this 
means that we should hate injustice and atro- 
city, but not Germans. Certainly it is difficult 
to direct the emotions in abstracto, but if we 
can succeed in doing so we shall have given 
ourselves the deepest possible assurance of 
the security of our national ideals. 

October, igij. 



142 



ESSENTIAL LIBERTY 



IN NO other name do men so readily fight 
as in the name of Hberty. There is in hu- 
man nature a profound and inexpungable 
love of the freedom which men instinctively 
hold to be natural with that nature, and there 
is required no more than the threat of restric- 
tion for this love to emerge ideally in the senti- 
ment of liberty and the will to sacrifice for it 
all other goods. No iron of oppression, no 
luxury of servitude made soft, not even the 
benefits of a solicitously paternal master, can 
compensate for freedom denied; the manna 
of the wilderness, salted with freedom, is more 
preciously savoured than all the wheat and 
honey of Goshen. 

But though the sentiment of liberty be 
thus deep and moving, the understanding of 
it is rare, and its realization is rarer still. 
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in 
chains." Rousseau's aphorism is the reflec- 
tion of paradoxical fact; history is as much 
a tale of embondment as of liberation; or 
perhaps it should be described as a tale of 
the ceaseless breaking of bonds that reset 
themselves so soon as broken, — for of all 
equilibria liberty is the most perilously in- 
secure. Can it be — we are forced to ask our- 

143 



ESSENTIAL LIBERTY 

selves such questions — that men are fooled 
about themselves, so that the love of freedom 
which comes so naturally to expression, is, 
in fact, a symptom of diseased rather than of 
healthy human nature? Or are there, as many 
have taught, natural masters and master races 
to whom this gift of liberty comes by endow- 
ment, so that they alone can be free, and this 
only at the expense of subjects and subject 
peoples out of whose subjection the master's 
freedom grows? Or, finally, and most ter- 
ribly, is liberty itself of such cruel essence 
that it must be secured by fratricide, — war 
its everlasting offspring? 

In a day such as ours these questions can- 
not be dismissed with the prosperous opti- 
mism of comfort-loving minds : facts do 
themselves propound them. Earth's nations 
are at war, and all are fighting in the name of 
liberty. War was first declared by a Father- 
land that announced itself threatened, on the 
specious plea that attack is the surest de- 
fence; and the war has throughout been 
accompanied by proclamations of the liberties 
that are its ends, — the right of great races to 
achieve their destinies unhampered; the right 
of small nations to maintain their independ- 
ence; and, by both sides, the right to free 
seas. Liberty is what all are fighting for; but 
clearly this liberty is no single thing, or there 
would be no war. Behind the sameness in 
plea there is a difference in cause; and now 
that America, too, has joined in the war, 

144 



ESSENTIAL LIBERTY 

and, like the others, with utterance of the 
name of liberty, it behooves Americans to 
judge with understanding for what kind of 
liberty they are fighting. Is it a liberty which 
must be realized through the subjection of 
others, or is it a liberty which all men may 
freely share, — a liberty truly democratic? 
And if it be the latter, are we deceived in 
fighting for it? 

In a way, the second question is the easier 
to answer; for we can see the hostile view 
more simply than we can understand our 
own. Germany has repeatedly and atrociously 
violated all our instincts of political right, 
and she has done this with a barefaced uncon- 
sciousness of offence that but makes more 
sheer the crevasse separating Teutonic and 
Anglo-Saxon convictions. So abruptly have 
we been startled that we have been inclined 
to ascribe German conduct to arrogant insult 
and deliberate diabolism; but here we have 
overshot, for German expression itself makes 
naively and convincingly clear that our antag- 
onism is justified by no such shallow diiference. 
It is intellectual in root, and is therefore more 
hopeless than mere moral perversion. 

In a speech delivered on the occasion of the 
emperor's birthday last January, Adolf Wer- 
muth, lord mayor of Berlin, is reported as 
saying: "In conjunction with the bells of 
peace will ring the bells of liberty, for no- 
body's harm and for everybody's joy. Liberty 
means that disorder is inferior to order. Lib- 



ESSENTIAL LIBERTY 

erty opens the way for energies making for 
progress, and it also is capable of being con- 
centrated in common work. Liberty is order." 
This utterance is, of course, no closet philos- 
ophy; it is frank oratory; but it shows how 
inevitably there rises to the lips of the official 
German the expression of the ideals of the 
will-compelling state. Order is admirable 
only when it is provisional and instrumental, 
and provisional of and instrumental to the 
good. In this sense it may be an element in 
liberty, that element, namely, which repre- 
sents the security for the individual of the 
right of judgment. But order in itself is the 
very antipode of liberty: the lock-step of 
chained convicts, the mechanical agreement 
of military movements, — these represent 
order, but they do not represent freedom. 
Intolerance of opposition with its correlative 
of blind obedience are the fundamentals of 
mere order, and they are the fundamentals, 
too, of the thing that in militaristic societies 
masquerades as liberty. The spectacle of the 
German machine setting out to war in August, 
1914, is the most terrible in history; for it 
showed in a whole nation abnegation of rea- 
son and betrayal of human nature. That the 
Germans believed, with mystical fervour, in 
their own social order, their civilization, their 
Kultur, is beyond doubt; insincerity is not 
one of their sins; but that they should have 
made of this belief the essence of their concep- 
tion of liberty serves but to measure the fear- 

146 



ESSENTIAL LIBERTY 

ful gap which parts them from democracies. 

But while it is easy to see the fault in what 
we would avoid, it is not so easy to discover 
the virtue of what we prize. The essence of 
liberty is illusive of analysis, possibly because 
the thing itself is so passionately a part of the 
colour of life. Nevertheless, no time so calls 
for a steadying sense of the reality as does the 
season of peril. Then, indeed, if we are to re- 
main men, we must think. 

In an hour when men's eyes are fascinated 
by a near and terrible spectacle, even the 
mention of times remote must draw forth 
breaths of impatience. Yet the sanity of 
conduct is its subjection to measure, and it is 
only through the remote that measure can be 
applied to the present. Among the first who 
consciously spoke of liberty, Aristotle is 
clearest. Liberty in democracies, he says, has 
two marks: equality of power and the privi- 
lege to live as one pleases. Neither of these 
characters can be fully realized, for equality 
of individuals necessarily gives way to ma- 
jority rule, while the desires of men often con- 
flict, so that if the one desire be realized the 
other must be defeated. A liberty which 
should rest upon equality of power could only 
exist by a compact of individuals or by a co- 
alition of states, involving mutual surrenders, 
such as appear in willing submission to the 
will of the majority. A liberty which should 
realize the satisfaction of desire, or, as we 
might say, the unrestricted pursuit of happi- 

147 



ESSENTIAL LIBERTY 

ness, could be possible only to the few, — ex- 
cept it be in the beatific company of perfectly 
socialized angels. Human conditions are such 
as to make liberty in this Aristotelian sense 
impossible. 

But there is another conception of liberty, 
expressed by the two greatest of Christian 
poets, adding an inner and Christian element 
to the objective, pagan notion. Both Dante 
and Milton make the essence of liberty to be 
rational choice; the only true human freedom 
is freedom of the reason-guided will. This 
conception turns not upon powers and privi- 
leges, but upon rights and responsibilities. 
The responsibilities flow from the rights, in- 
separably; and the rights flow from human 
nature. But the human nature which the 
poets see so endowed is not the animal and 
passional nature of man, but the rational 
nature, divinely created — so they believed — 
to lift men above brutish lusts. Liberty with 
them meant fidelity to reason, because reason 
alone can guide men to goodness. It is true 
that there is a radical difference in the appli- 
cation of this conception by the two: Dante, 
the medisevalist, beheld in reason a universal 
thing, only to be discovered in acquiescence 
to authority; Milton, looking beyond the 
Renaissance into the Enlightenment, found 
it individualized in men of conscience. But 
both struck to the heart of the problem: if 
there be such thing as a natural right to lib- 
erty, it belongs not to every breeze of passion 

148 



ESSENTIAL LIBERTY 

that may move men, but to that part of their 
natures which marks them as men; and this 
the reflection of all ages has afhrmed to be 
man's reason. It follows, quite simply, that 
the right to liberty is proportionate to reason; 
and again that devotion to the cause of liberty 
is not devotion to the whims of individual, or 
indeed of aggregate men, but purely a devo- 
tion to human nature on its humane side. 
Those who fight for liberty, in this Christian 
sense, are fighting for the right of reason- 
guided conduct. 

It should not require demonstration that 
the safety of reason is in democracy. Mach- 
iavelli remarks that it is easier to inspire a 
belief in a people than to maintain them in 
it; therefore, he argues, the wise prince should 
be prepared to enforce a belief which is ad- 
vantageous to his tyranny, if the people seem 
to be wearying of it. Recitations of the creed 
and oaths of loyalty find their most important 
use in centralized and tyrannical powers, 
where also they find their complement in In- 
quisitions and trials for lese-majeste. It is in 
democracies that freedom of speech is cher- 
ished, not so much that the uttered word is 
sacred as that it is the sole (even if oft-per- 
verted) instrument for the expression and 
maintenance of reason. Intolerance of private 
judgment is deadly to freedom. To be sure, 
if our moral reason were as secure of its de- 
ductions as is our mathematical reason, so 
that a demonstration once made were made 

149 



ESSENTIAL LIBERTY 

for all time, no tolerance would be in place. 
But it is just this security that fails us, and 
recognizing our mutual fallibility of judge- 
ment, in democracies we are tolerant of con- 
tradiction in thought and expression even 
while we demand a certain uniformity of 
conduct; enough, at least, to insure respect 
for mutual differences. 

Democratic liberty means, then, tolerance 
of individual judgement, for the sake of the 
cultivation of reason; it does not mean licence 
to individual appetite. Necessarily, it is to 
some degree anarchistic; it is founded on the 
assumption of individual differences and upon 
the intention to give these differences the 
freest play possible without mutual destruc- 
tion. It does not extend to conduct, except 
where conduct involves no mutual interfer- 
ence; so that it rests upon a final assumption 
of law. Were reason sure, tolerance would be 
no virtue and law would be without excep- 
tion; a perfect order would replace the anar- 
chy and an inviolable organization would be 
supreme over individual choice. If liberty 
could be spoken of in connection with such 
an order, it could be only the liberty of a uni- 
versal persuasion. The saints in Paradise have 
such a persuasion; on Earth it is unknown, — 
at least, outside of Germany. 

November, 1917. 



150 



AMERICA'S 
SELF-REVELATION 



I 

*' "W THAT can I say to my son, in the years 
W that are to come, of the honour of his 
country in 1914 and 1915? I ask my- 
self this question again and again. What can 
I say to my son of a country, great in strength 
and influence, that looked upon the bullying 
of Serbia with indifferent eyes, that permitted 
the rape of Belgium with no word of protest, 
that hardly ventured to raise its voice when 
its own citizens were massacred upon the 
high seas, and that could only listen 'with 
sympathetic attention' to the death cries of 
more than half a million unarmed people? 
To the vain struggle for liberty of the Ger- 
mans of '48 America responded with a full 
heart; the Magyar Kossuth was with us 
almost a national hero; but in the years 
1914-15, we saw people after people deprived 
of happiness and of liberty and of life itself, 
and remained unmoved. Oblivious of our 
great Declaration, forgetful of the meaning of 
our nationality, we put cash into our coffers 
and like cowards surrendered the nobility of 

151 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

our birthright. It is this that we must tell our 
sons and our sons' sons." 

The above is the concluding paragraph of a 
letter which the writer of this article pub- 
lished In a Nebraska daily at the time when 
the Armenian massacres were at their apogee. 
President Wilson, said the despatches of the 
day, was listening to the reports "with sym- 
pathetic attention"; but nothing was done, 
as nothing of moment had been done on any 
of the many previous occasions when the feel- 
ings of thousands of Americans were deeply 
outraged by the drunken barbarity of Ger- 
manic warfare. 

Thousands of Americans, shocked at the 
crimes against humanity, felt their nation's 
honour to be at stake, and they called for and 
expected from their government action that 
never came. For they were not the thousands 
that represent the sentiment of the United 
States to-day; Anglo-Saxons, for the more 
part, they were, children of the makers of 
the United States, and no doubt they repre- 
sented and represent the ideals in which the 
nation was founded and the traditions which 
it has created; but the nation as it exists to- 
day Is something far other than they had so 
quaintly dreamed it to be, something far less 
simple, far more complex, and tainted with 
an inner monstrosity which no brief period 
of years can purify away. 

The war has brought self-revelation to 
each of the contending nations; and if one 

152 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

may judge by the expressions • — religious in 
their enthusiasms — coming from the peoples 
of these nations, the war is bringing also to 
each its purification of character, its katharsis^ 
which, however tragic, is still noble. To the 
United States the war has also been the occca- 
sion of self-revelation, so that we see ourselves 
with unillusioned eyes; but the day of the 
purification is beyond the ken of our genera- 
tion. 

Friends of America, especially in France and 
England, have been quick (almost too quick) 
to explain us to ourselves and to condone, in 
a measure, what seems to so many, among 
them and among us, our national turpitude. 
But even when the interpretation comes from 
so sympathetic and gifted a writer as Mr. 
Gilbert Murray^ in our ears it rings thin and 
remote. Americans — and I speak now for 
those w^ho represent America's literate tradi- 
tion — are not happy about their nation's 
conduct, and most of them are in a daze about 
the nation's self. We are not what we had 
supposed ourselves to be; and the great prob- 
lem which confronts us, as a people, is to dis- 
cover what manner of spiritual being our 
country has. 

II 

The second autumn of the war had come. 
Here in Nebraska it was hard to realize. Ne- 

^The United States and the War (pamphlet), London, 1916. 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

braska is a land of glorious sunlight in the 
fall months, and the granaries were heavy 
with wheat and the fields thick with ripening 
maize. Everywhere men were building, better- 
ing, beautifying homes and properties; every- 
where there was plenty, honest work and 
hearty food. In the centre of a great conti- 
nent, walled by a thousand miles, in every 
direction, from the perils of the sea, and by 
great seas from the contentions of nations, 
Nebraska was safe and prosperous, — the top 
o' the world ! 

It is true that to many of us the noise of the 
war came faintly, and its red horror loomed, 
mirage-like, beyond the seas' horizons; when 
we greeted one another there was a reserva- 
tion behind the smile, and welcomes were 
classified by sympathies that burst into ex- 
pression where the company was congenial, — 
for the great war in Europe has socially 
divided Americans as internal issues rarely do. 
But all of us had our daily tasks — the tasks 
of peace — to perform; and routine readily 
dulls emotion. Sops to our conscience were 
raising funds for the Belgians, making Red 
Cross supplies, and boxing comforts for the 
French soldiers; but even these activities fell 
in the intermissions, so to speak, of the normal 
forgetfulness of occupied lives. 

It was on one of the brightest of these au- 
tumn days that I drove down the country to 
revisit the village where I had lived as a boy 
and which, as a youth, I had left twenty years 

154 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

before. As I recalled my boyhood, I could not 
but contemplate the changed appearance^ of 
the countryside. In my earliest recollection 
of it there were miles and miles of rolling 
prairie, grass-grown and treeless. Such had 
been the land for countless centuries before 
my father and the men of his generation had 
come into it, to change its face once for all. 
I could remember, too, how beautiful in those 
early days the prairies looked of autumn 
nights, banded in every direction by moving 
ribbons of fire; for the homesteaders were 
adventurous rather than provident men, and 
they cleared their land for tillage with the 
easy extravagance of pioneers. The country 
was still very beautiful, but in a new fashion; 
the virgin prairie was all gone; in its place 
were tilled fields and secluded pastures, and 
the rolling hills were varied in every direc- 
tion by upstanding groves and orchards 
planted by the hand of man. And what the 
country had become one realized that it must 
remain for centuries, aye, for millenia, to 
come: a generation of men, armed with 
hammer and plough, had swept over its sur- 
face, and converted the hunting grounds of the 
countless past into the farmsteads of the not 
less countless future. They were great ad- 
venturers, these men; and they left their mark 
upon Time. 

They were not the generation whose 
children were to inherit the land they trans- 
formed. I can remember, as a boy, how all the 



AMERICA'S SELF-RE\^LATION 

boys of the village and the country round 
about grew up with the idea that as men they 
were to go 'out West' to make fortunes for 
themselves; it never occurred to us that we 
might remain where our fathers had settled: 
had not these fathers, in their day, gone West 
in the search of fortune, and should the sons 
do less? It was the normal feeling that life 
is a matter of pioneering, and I am sure that 
any boy who entertained the notion of settling 
once for all where he was born was openly 
despised by his comrades. 

And as a matter of fact, most of them did go 
West, boys and girls, too. They went to the 
higher plains, where men fight drought; they 
went to the mountains; they went to the 
western sea. Their homes are in the Rockies, 
on the Pacific Coast, in Canada, Alaska, Mex- 
ico, South America, while Hawaii, the Philip- 
pines, Porto Rico know them, not a few, — 
boys, and girls, too, for the spirit of the quest 
is born wath no sex; it is of the blood and of 
the race. 

The village of my boyhood was peopled 
mostly by Anglo-Saxons. There were New 
Englanders, like my father and my two uncles; 
there was a colony from central New York, 
with beliefs about spirits and spirit-rappings; 
there were Southerners, Carolinians, Mis- 
sourians; and there were men bom in the 
Middle States when these states were frontiers. 
I remember an eccentric Frenchman, prob- 
ably a habitant irom Quebec; and I remember 

156 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

the old man who kept a tavern, the nucleus 
of the village, in the days when freighters and 
Indians were the interests of life: he used to 
open the polls on election days with the cry 
which the Norman heralds used at the medi- 
aeval tourneys — 'OyezI oyez!' — though I 
am sure that he, no more than I, had no un- 
derstanding of the term. 

But even then the Germans were coming 
in, and as I grew up I saw the Anglo-Saxons 
steadily giving way before them — with their 
closer thrift and, as we felt, inferior way of 
life. The men who had broken the soil were 
not to reap its harvests; and in 191 5, when I 
revisited the village, I found just two old men, 
retired from activity, of the American stock. 
Externally the village appeared much the 
same, except that the trees were more grown 
and the houses looked, as it were, better 
seated. But internally, said the old men, it 
was a different place; there was no longer any 
of that visionary magnification of mind which 
in the old days made its citizens feel that 
theirs was a town of destiny, that must one 
day become a metropolis; there was no longer 
any inner agitation. The village had settled 
down to be just what it is, a country hamlet, — 
a German country hamlet. I asked my friends 
how lay their sympathies in the matter of the 
War; they answered, "Oh, we are for the 
Allies, strongly; but we say nothing about it^ 
here everyone is the other way." 



157 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

III 

The village which I have described is in a 
significant sense typical of the country. Here 
in Nebraska we have German communities, 
Bohemian communities, Danish and Swedish 
communities; but one pricks up one's ears 
when one gets word of an American commu- 
nity, and if a village or district is so spoken 
of it is likely to turn out to be in the western 
part of the state, where pioneer conditions 
have not yet faded away. Not that all Anglo- 
Saxons are pioneers, even when born to the 
tradition; thousands of them are in the larger 
towns and cities, and still more thousands 
form a perpetual drift through the settlements 
of the less shifting elements. On the whole 
they control the literate expression of the 
country, and doubtless they represent its 
greatest property interests. But even if our 
Fifth Avenues and Back Bays are Anglo- 
Saxon in character, this does not argue that 
our social sub-structure is of the same stuff. 
In the cities, no less than in the country, the 
homogeneous quarters are given over to 
stranger peoples; there are Italian, Jewish, 
Irish, German, Polish quarters; there are 
Syrian, Chinese, Japanese centres; but one 
never hears of an American centre or quarter. 
Of course, one will say, 'But the whole is 
American'; and so it is, in its polyglot fashion; 
but so it is not in the sense that it is governed 
by, or even comprehends, the ideals that 

158, 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

America has hitherto represented. The Anglo- 
Saxon element is our pioneer element, but, 
like a thin foundation wash, it is being gradu- 
ally obliterated by the masses of solid colour 
that are to form the ultimate picture. If it 
serve the purposes of the wash, to give unity 
and harmony to the whole in the day of the 
completion, it will have done the most that 
can be expected. 

These foreign-born communities, each after 
its kind, tend to become centres of distinctive 
ideas and ideals. Partly these are accepta- 
tions of American thoughts and ways; partly 
they are adaptations to the new requirements 
of life in an adopted land; partly they are 
transplantations from the Old World. Mid 
the currents and counter-currents of their 
fluid Anglo-Saxon environment these local 
solidarities are slowly abraded, slowly trans- 
formed; but their resisting powers are great, 
reinforced by differences of language and 
religion, and often by the leadership of in- 
tellectuals — pastors and editors — whose 
ideal is the maintenance of Old World tradi- 
tions, — upon which, indeed, their own office 
depends. 

In states, such as those of the Union, having 
easy naturalization and a republican govern- 
ment, such communities need not be numer- 
ous in order to hold the balance of electoral 
power. Their very homogeneity and seclu- 
siveness give them political unity; the Anglo- 
Saxon idea of the ballot as fundamentally a 

159 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

certificate of freedom is hard to master, espe- 
cially when the foreigner is taught (usually 
by politicians of his own race) that this ballot 
is an instrument to be used in his self-interest. 
In America we speak of the Irish, the Italian, 
the German, the Bohemian vote, but never 
of the Anglo-Saxon vote; and out of the con- 
dition so indicated springs the fact that in our 
representative government it is the Anglo- 
Saxon alone who is never represented. It 
becomes the whole art of the politician to play 
to the foreign vote which in his particular 
district holds the balance of power; and as 
this play must be not merely preliminary to 
ofhce, but must be continued while he is in 
office, it transpires that everywhere the for- 
eigner finds representation of his 'interests' 
easy. It happens, too, that the expression of 
opinion by the press and by the literate public 
(literate, I mean, in the native American tra- 
dition) becomes relatively less important: its 
apparent value is always much greater than 
its real value, — at least, so far as political 
conduct is concerned. It is surely a feeling 
for this truth that underlies President Wil- 
son's remark before the Gridiron Club, in 
February, 1916: "I would a great deal rather 
know what they are talking about around 
quiet firesides all over the country than 
what they are talking about in the cloak- 
rooms of Congress. I would a great deal 
rather know what the men on the trains and 
by the wayside and in the shops and on the 

160 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVEI ATION 

farms are thinking about and yearning for 
than hear any of the vociferous proclamations 
of policy which it is so easy to hear, and so 
easy to read by picking up any scrap of 
printed paper." Democracies are notoriously 
suspicious of literacy; printed paper seems 
to imply studied reflection, and the vox populi 
never expresses itself so, — at least, not when 
the language is King's English. 

IV 

All this represents a change in American 
society, and a complexification of it. Not the 
least important phase of this is the diminution 
of the importance of the British tradition. 
I can remember, in my boyhood, how orators 
were still 'twisting the Lion's tail,' and to the 
exhilaration of all. That is long since passed, 
and not wholly to England's advantage. The 
Anglo-Saxon American comprehended and 
enjoyed the trope; it fitted in with his con- 
ception of the importance of Britain, magnify- 
ing the daring of his own country. To the 
newer American the figure is lost; he comes 
from the Continent, with respect to which the 
British Isles are 'outlying'; nor is the Ameri- 
can Revolution for him a speaking symbol: 
he remembers the far bloodier wars of the Old 
World. There isnolongerpoliticalcapital inthe 
old-style oratory, and the 'Lion's tail,' along 
with the 'bloody shirt' belongs to the past. 

England has diminished in American eyes, 
i6i 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

with the passing years and the rising tide of 
Continental immigration. But Europe as a 
whole has increased in moment. Europe has 
always been for us Americans — though we be 
for three centuries native born — what Rome 
was for the Medisevalist, a seat of higher in- 
telligence and hoary marvels. Just as, as boys, 
we grew up with the expectation of going West 
to seek our fortunes, so as schoolboys we im- 
bibed the hope that — the fortune once made 
— we might go some day to 'Europe' to 'get 
culture. ' Americans are not conceited about 
their attainment in the refinements of life, — 
however much they may believe in the ad- 
venturous opportunities of the New World. 
And in this respect the later immigrants are 
like the earlier. Indeed, they are sometimes 
almost officiously ready to instruct us, pre- 
suming on their own more recent contact 
with the fount of culture; and in particular 
to free us from the notion that insular Britain 
represented any essential part of the European 
gift. Even before the War had spawned 
Fatherland, Mr. George Sylvester Viereck had 
announced himself as the emancipator of 
American letters from Puritanism, and as the 
apostle of a free and unabashed Conti- 
nentalism; while since the War began, Hugo 
Muensterberg has more than once tactfully 
reminded us that he remains upon our shores, 
not from heart's choice, but as a missionary 
of culture, self-exiled from the land of its 
realization: "It was an exquisite pleasure to 

.162 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

meet this English minister. . . . And in the 
twinkling of his eyes was all the time that 
harmless, delicious superciliousness which the 
cultured Englishman in contact with another 
educated European never forgets when he 
talks about America." The 'other educated 
European' was, of course, in this case, Hugo 
Aduensterberg. 

It is by the Germans most that the lesson 
of culture has been given us, partly because 
of their upstanding conviction that it is theirs 
to give, partly because so many Americans, 
especially of the teaching class, have been 
educated in Germany and share the German 
conviction. But other nationalities have not 
been backward in showing us ourselves as 
they see us, — not always backward, nor deli- 
cate. I remember meeting a Scotsman once: 
"Ah, you have a Scot's name," said he; and 
I, responding with shy geniality, "Yes, and it 
is from Scotland." "Your father.^" he asked. 
"No," I acknowledged, "it has been here for 
some two hundred years." "Oh," said he 
(and I cannot forget the fine tone of it), "the 
good of it's long since gone!" I know, too, of 
a group of American college girls taking boat 
at Rotterdam; an English boy, with his 
father, on deck as they embarked, remarked, 
"I say, father, I didn't know we had taken 
passage on a cattle-ship!" Fortunately one 
of the girls had an English cousin whose fine 
hospitality had given them a better insight 
into British character. Not all Americans are 

163 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

so fortunate; and I am of the opinion that 
among educated Americans generally the 
French are, of all Europeans, the most highly 
esteemed, — for the French never insult us, 
though they may look upon us with a polite 
amusement, of which we are neither uncon- 
scious nor resentful. 

But there is another reason for our liking 
for the French, and I think a more fundamental 
one. With much truth, and probably with 
some exaggeration of the truth because of 
America's association with France during the 
Revolution, the American feels that the ideals 
in which his government was founded are 
French in parentage, — the doctrine of the 
rights of man, the creed of freedom and equal- 
ity, the whole political humanitarianism of 
the eighteenth century. There is no great 
European country which is represented among 
us by a thinner stream of immigration than is 
France; in the United States we never hear 
of a ' French vote, ' — or if we hear of it, what 
is meant is the vote of the descendants of the 
French colonists in Quebec or Louisiana, as 
long in America as any of us. Yet France has 
probably a stronger hold on us than has any 
other European nation, and for the reason 
that we feel that we share her ideals more 
than those of any other. No doubt, our gov- 
ernment is actually more English than French, 
but partly the manner in which the United 
States were born and partly the fact of the 
English monarchy have prevented the real- 

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AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

ization of this. In any case, the element of 
interest in our ideal history is the gradual 
strengthening of our sympathies with France 
and the weakening of our sense of dependence 
upon England and England's culture. Blood 
is certainly thicker than water; and to-day 
Anglo-Saxon blood in America beats with the 
hope of British victory. But year by year 
America is less and less Anglo-Saxon; the 
blood thins and fuses. Yet there is a bond 
which is stronger and more lasting than the 
tie of blood-kinship; and this is the bond of 
common ideals. It is the bond which in the 
past has held us to, and drawn us closer to 
France; it is the bond which in the future 
will surely draw us and hold us to all those 
nations which love justice and freedom and 
respect human rights; and it is a bond which, 
stringent in our midst to-day, is holding us in 
division, — for, in the hour of our self-revela- 
tion, we have discovered that many who call 
themselves citizens of the United States and 
share the rights of our polity have no respect 
for the tradition in which it was founded, no 
faith for the principles for which it has stood. 

V 

It took the great War to bring us our self- 
revelation. The chasm in our midst existed, 
no doubt, long before; but I think neither 
party realized it, for the native Americans 
were naively unsuspicious, and it was to the 

i6s 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

interest of the newcomers to acquire an 
understanding of the native Americans; to 
the difficulties in the way of such an under- 
standing, it was easy to credit all the differ- 
ences that were felt. As a boy, raised among 
German boys, I was dimly conscious that 
their tradition, in sport and school, was not 
altogether that of their American playfellows; 
and in later years I noticed something of a 
similar feeling among men in politics, — but 
boys and men alike ascribed this to slowness 
and dullness and Old World conservatism, 
regarding it as an infirmity rather than as an 
intention. It is true that we were aware that 
the Scandinavians, for example, 'Ameri- 
canized' much more rapidly and whole- 
heartedly than the Germans; and this might 
have caused reflection. Certain other events 
might have aroused us, — the incident of 
Manila Bay, — but the Germans in America, 
though grieved, were loyal, and we never 
really took the Kaiser seriously. More sig- 
nificant, perhaps, were internal incidents. 
In a city of the Middle West, environed by 
many German communities, an annual 'Ger- 
man Day' was set as a fete, the celebration 
being given into the charge of the local branch 
of the German-American Alliance, though the 
thing was made possible by cash grants from 
the commercial club of the city. The fete was 
celebrated with music, with orations in Ger- 
man and in English, and with a street pageant 
consisting of floats representing Teutonic 

1 66 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

knights in armour, squires in blond wigs and 
velvets, dames and peasant girls, — Siegfrieds, 
Loreleis, and Marguerites, all a bit tawdry 
and dusty, and all set off with the red, white, 
and black and imperial eagles. Naturally, 
the celebration seemed exotic and unin- 
telligible to native Americans, and the com- 
mercial club, in order to save it from utter 
ruin, approached the German-American Alli- 
ance with the proposal that the fete be 
changed into a *Day of All Nations,' for the 
immigrants from every country. The pro- 
posal was indignantly rejected: the day was 
to be 'German Day' or the Germans would 
have no part in it, — and so the fete was dis- 
continued. This was a year or so before the 
War. But nothing of all this really affected us ; 
since, for one thing, we all knew scores of men 
of German birth and descent who were and 
are as complete Americans as any of us. It 
took the War to bring to us a sense of the 
division in our midst. 

Since the War has come, German-Ameri- 
cans among us have been wont to ascribe the 
American sympathy with the Allies quite as 
much to our 'prejudice' against them as to 
' English lies. ' If the prejudice existed, Ameri- 
cans, I am sure, were utterly unaware of it. 
No nationality in the United States has been 
more continuously and fervidly praised, by 
politicians, professors, and press in equal 
measure, than have the Germans; and I think 
that this praise represented a real respect for 

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AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

the economic value of the German commu- 
nities as well as for the reputation of German 
learning. Indeed, when the War broke out, 
it came to us with a shock of incredibility; 
in spite of talk, we believed the Germans in- 
capable of it, and the guilt of Germany, in 
forcing war, was only conceded when Belgium 
was raped and the diplomatic correspondence 
(German and English) made the case palpable 
to all reason. The flood of pronunciamentos 
and propagandist literature from German 
sources, which immediately followed, dis- 
pelled the last lingering doubt that here we 
were face to face with a theory and conduct 
of statecraft which we had supposed impos- 
sible for a civilized people. 

But a second and even more shocking reve- 
lation was in store for us. With a naivete 
which now seems pathetic we turned to our 
German-American fellow-citizens with the 
full expectation that they would view the 
crime as we viewed it. In numberless cases 
this expectation was justified, but not at all 
for the great mass of the Germanic popula- 
tion: the local conservative communities, with 
their own press and their own pastors, were 
on the other side. We began to hear strange 
rumours. A German laundress tells her mis- 
tress that her pastor says the Americans must 
be brought to their senses if the Germans have 
to use force for it. Another asks if it is really 
true that the Germans and Americans are to 
fight; and soon there are quite ridiculous tales 

i68 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

of armouries in the basements of Lutheran 
churches. Of greater moment were the ex- 
pressions of the German press and of German 
leaders: public men were assailed with a 
venom far beyond anything that is aroused by 
our internal politics; professors who expressed 
sympathy with the Allies were lectured, with 
ill-concealed threats; and perhaps most sig- 
nificant of all, these leaders of Germanism 
ceased speaking of themselves as 'Americans,' 
— 'those Americans,' they would say, with 
obvious sense of their division from their 
fellow-citizens. When the Lusitania was sunk 
a German-American who had been for many 
years a voter in the United States and a poli- 
tical leader among his own people was heard 
to say: "I hope every American aboard was 
drowned." 

To be sure, there is another side to the pic- 
ture. An old German farmer, Prussian by 
birth, was prodded by his neighbours for 
seeming apathy in the cause. He answered: 
" What has the Kaiser ever done for me ? Hard 
work and little pay. America has given me 
a home." A lawyer overheard a group of 
German clients, in his anteroom, scoring the 
Americans. Finally, one who had kept silent 
broke out: "You men are fools! What did 
you come to America for.? I came here to live 
and to be an American. I do not even let my 
children talk German, and my wife and I, we 
try to talk English in the home." The rest 
were silenced. I know two German teachers 

169 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

of German. One of them came to America 
as a youth, and he has since visited Germany. 
He says: "I am an American. All that is 
behind me. They do not understand us over 
there." He is deeply grieved for the Father- 
land which he deeply loves, but he feels that 
reason and righteousness demand an Allied 
victory. The other is the son of a German of 
'48, who came to America to escape militar- 
ism; he has never seen Europe, but German 
blood and German literature have won him 
altogether to the cause of the Empire: "It 
has taken the War," he told a colleague, "to 
make me realize that I am not an American." 
Still another is a professor of science, German 
by birth and education up through the doctor- 
ate: "Of all countries," he said, "I prefer to 
live in America; next come England, France, 
Italy; I prefer Germany, I think, to Russia." 
I know American sons of German-American 
fathers and American brothers of German- 
American brothers, but these are only symbols 
of the division that cleaves the nation, — as 
are, too, those occasional Anglo-Saxon Ameri- 
cans, men educated in German science or art, 
whose sympathies are with the Central Powers. 

VI 

The division exists; the war has made us 
realize it; what, then, is its true character and 
meaning? Partly, no doubt, it is the reflection 
of a wholly natural veneration for the land 

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AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

that was the home of one's ancestors and the 
parent of one's own aspirations. If 'blood is 
thicker than water, ' there is surely no reason 
why German blood should be thinner than 
English blood; and in the hour of the Father- 
land's stupendous effort, what German heart 
can fail to be thrilled by it? 

If this were all, Americans would have no 
cause for a deep uneasiness: a few years of 
peace would heal the division. But it is not 
all. The thing that stirs us is the discovery of 
a radical divergence of political and national 
ideals. As I have said, the United States was 
founded, and has been nurtured, in the hu- 
manitarian tradition, — the tradition which, 
through France, harks back to the republican- 
ism of Rome and the democracy of Athens. 
The Germans come to us with the tradition 
of feudalism and aristocracy unbroken, and 
with the addition of a modern and conscious 
philosophy of the state. What that philosophy 
is in its European expression, all men now 
know. What it is in its New World reflection 
I may best indicate by illustration. Shortly 
after the opening of the war I gave several 
public talks on the issue as it appeared to me, 
and on its consequences and meanings for 
America, Following one of these, I received a 
letter from a leader among the German-Amer- 
icans, a man of the finest German type, culti- 
vated in taste, read in history and letters, an at- 
torney by profession and acquainted with the 
development of the law. I quotefromthis letter : 

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AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

... I have read several of your recent addresses and 
letters and have been agreeably touched by the se- 
riousness and sympathetic thoughtfulness of their tone. 
I discover in them also a note of depression, of doubt, 
of mournfulness, that indicates the ferment you are 
undergoing. You seem to be passionately striving to 
rise out of the tragedy into peace, to escape from the 
sad minor into the triumphant major. In mingled doubt 
and hope you turn your eyes to Christianity. 

The question arises: What do you mean by that 
term.'' Lessing once said that Christianity had been 
tried for eighteen hundred years, but the religion of 
Christ never. Traditional, historic Christianity, that 
patchwork, that motley garment, seems to me much 
more man-made than war. War is simple, elemental, 
intelligible. Reasoning inductively, one finds it as nat- 
ural as other forms of human activity. In fact, if we 
admit the necessity of the state, I do not see how we 
can escape admitting the necessity of war. The state 
has no soul to save. Power is its aim, its need; force 
its ultima ratio. Pitt said, "English diplomacy is Eng- 
lish trade." He was a great man and spoke bluntly, as 
great men do. What he said of England in Napoleon's 
time is just as true of England to-day, though English 
statesmen of to-day have not Pitt's size and bluntness 
and pretend that England entered upon this war as the 
champion of morality and democracy. . . . 

There has been more agitation in the last dozen years 
in behalf of peace than in all times preceding, and we 
see it followed by the greatest war in history. Put so- 
called Christianity to the proof, and ask yourself then 
what you have a right to expect of it. It has caused 
many, many wars; so far as I am informed, it has not 
prevented one. . . . 

'Power is the aim of the state, force its 
ultima ratio.'' To Americans this is a strange- 
sounding doctrine. In our day we have sinned 
in the employment of force, as other nations 

172 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

have; but we have never been led to this em- 
ployment by a philosophy of force; and I 
think we may point with pardonable satis- 
faction to one notable instance in which we 
have resisted the temptation to take all that 
our strength might claim: I mean the case of 
Cuba after the Spanish War. We had then 
with us two parties: one claiming the eco- 
nomic good of conquest, the other asserting 
the inw^ard good of honour — and the latter 
won. To-day we have two similar parties, 
whereof the one is proclaiming that the final 
reason of states is power, while the other in- 
sists that justice and the law are for the curb- 
ing of the arrogant and the protection of the 
weak. 

VII 

To the future belongs the issue, an imperial- 
istic or a democratic United States of America. 
To the present belongs the problem of a start 
toward the solution of this issue. It is small 
wonder that Americans of every complexion 
to-day find their country full of division and 
complication, uncertainty and puzzle. Noth- 
ing could better illustrate this than the spotty 
and enigmatical election of 1916. Of the two 
presidential candidates, the one stood for a 
record that had pleased ne"ther party (I mean 
neither of the real parties in the land, the 
sub-political parties); the other stood for an 
attempt to please all diversities of opinion. 

^72 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

Numberless voters were in doubt as to how to 
vote even within a few days of election, hoping 
that something decisive would put one man or 
the other squarely upon one side or the other. 
German-Americans were anxious to prove their 
strength, and Fatherland, fearful of predic- 
tion, comically argued that if Hughes were 
elected it would be because of punishment 
meted out to Wilson by German-American 
votes, that if Wilson were successful it would 
be because Roosevelt was the millstone that 
had drowned Hughes. In Nebraska, I heard 
say, the German-Americans were instructed 
to vote for Hughes; but the state went tre- 
mendously for Wilson, — for the reason, as 
rumour hath it, that the German farmers 
roundly asserted that Wilson had brought good 
prices and good times with his administra- 
tion, and for Wilson they would vote. 

But the election has settled nothing, and 
Wilson is president by happy chance, so far 
as men can see. What he will do with his 
second administration none can foresee. But 
one thing seems evident, that, like most 
Americans, he is puzzled by the political en- 
vironment; and many of us think, too, that 
his conception of his own office is fatally 
weak. " I do not know what they [the people] 
are thinking about," he said in May, 1916; 
"I have the most imperfect means of finding 
out, and yet I have got to act as if I knew. 
That is the burden of it, and I tell you, gentle- 
men, it is a pretty serious burden, particu- 

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AMERICAS SELF-REVELATION 

larly if you look upon the office as I do — that 
I am not put there to do what I please. . . . 
I am put there to interpret, to register, to 
suggest, and more than that, and much 
greater than that, to be suggested to." 

Undoubtedly in an ideal democracy, where 
the national conceptions were homogeneous 
and division only existed on the minor ques- 
tion of the ways and means of realization, 
such a theory of the executive office is com- 
plete and satisfying. But in a nation such as 
is the United States, made up of communities 
and elements having disparate and unamal- 
gamated ideals of the task of the nation and 
the meaning of nationality, no notion of office 
could be more mischievous. In moral issues 
we must have leaders and partizans, for moral 
ideals are the creation of thinking men, not of 
collective groups, — Socrates, Plato, Savon- 
arola, Lincoln, — such men create ideals in 
expressing them. President Wilson was far 
better inspired when he said (in the month 
following the above): "I have not read his- 
tory without observing that the greatest 
forces in the world, and the only permanent 
forces, are the moral forces." This is essential 
truth. Its supplement is that moral forces 
are called into expression by moral leaders 
and are actualized only under the inspiration 
of moral leadership. The deep need of the 
United States to-day is for men who, them- 
selves having an understanding of justice 
and a passionate love of it, are able to impart 

175 



AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION 

both the understanding and the love to those 
citizens-in-tutelage who are with us but as 
yet not wholly of us, to the end that the 
nation may yet stand conscious and whole in 
its Americanism. 

November, igi6. 



176 



LETTERS TO THE 
PUBLIC 



A LETTER TO STUDENTS 

STUDENTS and professors returning to 
the University of Nebraska this fall will 
see little change in the outward aspect 
of things. The college yard and buildings are 
the yard and buildings of former years; the 
sights of the town are the familiar sights. 
Except that Nebraska is blessed with a peace- 
ful abundance which gives us all a more than 
ordinary feeling of security, this year is ex- 
ternally like the years of the past; and the 
students' duties, we may suppose, will follow 
the routine which time has made familiar. 

And yet an intense, if unseen, change has 
taken place. We may fall into customary 
grooves, but the spirit with which we do 

Note. — ^The papers here entitled "Letters to the Public"" were 
originally addressed to the students of the University of Nebraska, 
and they are, doubtless, even more obviously seasonable and local 
than the other contents of this volume. Certainly, they pretend to 
no novelty of idea; but as certain of the ideas which they do express 
seem to the author imoortant enough to deserve expression many 
times and on varied occasions, they are here included. There is, too, 
a possible interest attaching to the records of a developing concep- 
tion of the meaning of the war. 

177 



LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

so will be unlike that of any former year. The 
problems of life, and above all, the problems 
of education, have suddenly presented an 
aspect which they never wore before, and 
student and professor alike is face to face with 
issues calling for every intellectual effort of 
which each is capable. 

Outwardly we cannot realize this European 
War; inwardly it is yet vague to us; but the 
certainty that it is bound to alter the whole 
course of our lives, individual and national, 
few will deny. Perhaps the most far-reaching 
feature of the conflict, and certainly its deepest 
significance to us, is hardly indicated in the 
daily news. I mean its relation to the main- 
tenance and progress of those arts and sciences 
which are the heart and life of our civilization. 
Men are prone to gauge progress by its outer 
glories, — feats of engineering, expansion of 
commerce, stabilization of governments; but 
we should never forget that behind the bridge 
is the mathematical formula, supporting com- 
merce is scientific investigation, and nourish- 
ing statecraft is the wisdom which comes from 
the preservation of human experience in 
human history. Without the intellectual sub- 
structure the outward pomp of our culture 
would vanish like a mirage. 

And what does this war mean for the in- 
tellect of the world.'' France, England, and 
Germany have carried this earth's intellectual 
burdens and achieved its intellectual tri- 
umphs for the past five centuries. The train- 

178 



LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

ing of a mind is not accomplished in a day; 
its gift to society is the slow labour of years. 
Can anyone doubt that whatever the outcome 
of the present war in a political way its effects 
upon the trained minds of Western Europe 
can be only disastrous? The higher works of 
peace, when peace is restored, will suffer more 
terribly than all else. Science, scholarship, 
literature, art, these must give way to the 
more pressing needs of political and economic 
and social reconstruction; the machine must 
be rebuilt before its product can be manu- 
factured, the garden must be regrown before 
its fruits can be forthcoming. Partly this will 
be due to economic stress, for mental achieve- 
ment is only possible in well-provisioned 
societies; partly it will be due to actual loss 
of trained minds, the young men of university 
training whose lives are lost or maimed, the 
gifted children to whom education must be 
denied, the many hundreds of men whose 
nervous and mental strength will be per- 
manently weakened by the stress of war; and 
in part it will be due to the fact that Europe 
will require all its surviving intellectual powers 
to repair its immediate ills. France, exhausted 
by the Napoleonic wars, required the long leth- 
argy of the reign of Louis Philippe to partially 
regain its lost spiritual energy. Can any man 
think that the present war will not be far more 
deadly to the spirit of modern Europe? 

And in view of this, what is our part? 
America is ill-prepared to become the bearer 

179 



LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

of the light of culture; it is to no trained 
runner that the torch is cast. Yet it is obvious 
that the race is to us. For the next generation, 
perhaps for the next century, or five centuries, 
we must stand in the forefront of progress, 
performing a great, if not the greater share 
of the world's mental labours — this, if the 
work is to be performed at all. It would be 
the idlest of conceits for us to suppose that we 
can succeed in such a task without the most 
intense and serious effort; we are as yet far 
from the van of progress, and must achieve 
what the other nations are losing before we can 
pass them; the immediate future of the world, 
despite our best, is certain to be a period of 
retrogression; nevertheless, if we persist, we 
may hope eventually to save the loss, and 
better it with gain. In any case, the duty of 
effort is clear. 

But what is the first step } 

It is one the students must take — a step 
for our youth. I have already said that the 
training of minds is slow. It is slowest of all 
for work in those fields which require long and 
impersonal effort; for work in science and 
scholarship and the patient analysis of his- 
tory. Without work of this character, civiliza- 
tion must perish; hitherto, we have borrowed 
its fruits from generous fatherlands; now we 
must mature them by our own toils. The task 
of the generation calls for a certain amount of 
abnegation of personal interest and prospect; 
it calls for a willingness on the part of our 

1 80 



LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

young men and women to undertake the most 
labourious paths of knowledge, to prepare 
themselves with even a painful thoroughness 
for handling problems for which no preparation 
can be altogether adequate, and finally to find 
their contentment not in immediate advantage 
to themselves but in the final gain of the race. 
We have fed upon the sugars of culture; let 
us now make its honest bread. 

For each individual the problem of the ad- 
vantageous route must be a private problem. 
Each must decide, from the best light of his 
own reason and the best thoughts of friends 
and advisers, in what immediate direction his 
studies shall work. The main requirements 
from the individual are, first, a willingness to 
give oneself wholly to the evident need, and 
second, a resolve to act only upon the maturest 
judgement which nature concedes. Starting 
with such a spirit, the right way will sooner 
or later be found. 

But while all is thus general, I wish none the 
less to indicate one great gap in our national 
preparation for the task that is ours, — as I 
think, the greatest gap. More than any great 
folk we are in need of men and women with 
a clear sense of the sources and promptings of 
our civilization, with a developed historical 
sense, in its richest meaning. What differ- 
entiates civilized man from the savage is the 
civilized man's knowledge of his own history; 
such knowledge is the only sure anchor of 
culture. We cannot know ourselves until we 

i8i 



LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

know the past, not only of those who were our 
physical fathers, but above all of those people 
who have given us our spiritual heritage. 
This is no light or easy study. It calls for 
knowledge of languages, ancient and modern; 
it calls for devotion to political, economic, and 
social history, and to the logical analysis of 
fact; it calls for familiarity with the litera- 
tures, arts, and philosophies of Western peo- 
ples, from Greek and Hebrew to the English 
and German; and it calls for a power of 
effective use of this knowledge. Not all is 
open to one student, though he give a lifetime 
to the field; but if many students, from many 
angles, give earnest effort to this central task 
of preserving, as living thought, the hard- 
earned experience of generations, then indeed 
we may be certain that whether America's 
addition to the world's culture be great or 
little, it will yet have won the gratitude of 
future generations by preserving in time of 
threatening darkness man's most precious 
wisdom. 

September, 1914. 

II 

THE WAR AND MEN'S IDEALS. 

To-day the United States is a judge among 
nations. Never before has a neutral people 
been so urgently called upon by belligerents to 

182 



LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

judge the righteousness of their cause. France 
has laid before our Government formal pro- 
tests. Belgium has sent an embassy to our 
shores. The leading men of Great Britain have 
addressed us through the press. Germany has 
gone even farther. Her ambassador in this 
country has been her public pleader. German 
scholars have addressed formal statements to 
Americans. In this country and abroad Ger- 
man organizations are sending broadcast 
among us special pleas for the sympathy of 
the people of the United States. The whole 
belligerent world is appealing to us to sit in 
judgement upon the causes for which they 
are fighting, and the whole world expects from 
us the judge's decision. In this fact, indeed, 
is to be found the one bright promise which 
the war holds; each of the warring nations is 
fighting for what it believes to be the right; 
each is appealing to us in full confidence that 
our decision will express our conviction of 
right. The war is a war of men's ideals. 

In view of this appeal, what is our duty.f" 
That we cannot refrain, as a people, from pro- 
nouncing our judgement should be clear to 
every man. That in so doing we must act 
with judicial uprightness and impartiality all 
worthy men will concede. Parenthetically, 
this seems to me all that President Wilson's 
public caution was intended to convey; I 
mention this because in some quarters in this 
state the President's plea for the true spirit 
of neutrality is apparently taken to be a com- 

183 



LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

mand to silence, spiritual as well as verbal. 

What, then, does an impartial judgement 
demand of us? Three things, before all: 

(i) That we should get at the truth, get the 
historic facts that led up to the war and affect 
its course. 

(2) That we should endeavour to under- 
stand the cause of each belligerent power and 
people as that cause is felt in the belligerent 
lands. Judicial fairness can only follow sym- 
pathetic understanding. 

(3) That we should estimate the probable 
consequences of the several possible outcomes 
of the war upon civilization as a whole. That 
is, we must render our decision with a view to 
the good of humanity as a whole, to the civiliza- 
tion of the future as well as that of the past. 

The first question divides into two parts, 
which have unfortunately been too often con- 
fused in the public mind: namely, {a) What 
is the immediate, {b) What is the remote his- 
torical cause of this war.^ The first of these 
queries, as to the immediate cause of the war, 
has been already answered, as I believe, to the 
full satisfaction of the American people. It 
has been answered by the warring nations 
themselves; for in the diplomatic correspond- 
ence as published by England, Germany, and 
Russia we have so many official briefs for the 
cases of these nations. These briefs are in 
essential agreement as to the facts; they mu- 
tually verify one another, and hence we have 
no reason to doubt their evidence. It is the 

184 



LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

consensus of the great journals of the United 
States that these documents establish the fact 
that Germany precipitated the present war 
as her only defence of principles which she 
regarded as sacred. 

But a mere answer as to the immediate does 
not fix the ultimate responsibility for the war. 
None of the warring nations, save it be Servia, 
rests its case wholly upon the evidence of the 
official papers. Thus it is clear from Russia's 
promises to Poland that the temper of Russia 
is, as the Germans say, Pan-Slavic, and that 
she hopes to maintain the Slavic countries of 
Eastern Europe in individual autonomy under 
the Czar's suzerainty. France is actuated not 
only by the need of self-preservation, under 
attack, but by a desire to recover what a pre- 
vious war lost to her. England's savage as- 
sault upon Prussian militarism shows that 
she too recognizes other reasons than the 
violation of Belgian neutrality for her attitude; 
indeed, England never pretended that this 
was her only casus belli; her minister informed 
Germany as early as July 29 (White Papers, 
No. 89) that if France became involved Eng- 
land could not stand aside. Finally, Germany, 
most of all, in her many defences of the right- 
eousness of the war, throws the blame for it 
upon conditions precedent to the immediate 
occasion. 

As impartial judges (and I believe that the 
intelligent people of the United States have 
been and are impartial in their judgement), 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

we must endeavour to get at the soul and 
right of each national contention. Sympa- 
thetic understanding is, as I have stated, the 
second requisite of impartial judgement. This 
is difficult to achieve, but it is our really im- 
portant task; all else is but symptomatic. 

To begin in the East, Russia's attitude is 
not difficult to comprehend. Pan-Slavism 
awoke as a response to Pan-Germanism, as a 
reply to German dominion of Slavic peoples 
and even more to the contempt for the Slavs 
which the Germans are not always slow in 
expressing. No Germanic state is dominated 
by the Slavs; several Slavic states are ruled 
by Germans. In the light of this fact and of 
the further fact of the nationalistic revivals 
of the past half-century, Pan-Slavism is in- 
telligible, whether or no we sympathize with 
Russia; and the adequacy of the cause for 
war, from the Russian standpoint, — namely, 
the attempt of a Germanic state to dominate a 
Slavic,^ — is clear. That the reduction of Servia 
"to the status of a vassal" was the real issue 
in the eyes of both Servia and Russia is fully 
proved by the Prince Regent of Servia's appeal 
to the Czar (Orange Papers, No. 6), by the 
objection of Servia to those Austrian demands 
which involved the nullification of the Servian 
constitution (paragraphs i, 4, and 6 of the 
Servian reply to Austria), and by the explicit 
statements of the Russian premier (Orange 
Papers, No. 25; English White Papers, No. 

139). 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

So much for the attitude of Russia. The 
attitudes of Austria, Servia, France, and Bel- 
gium are also clearly intelligible. Each of 
these states was directly threatened with de- 
struction and responded with an effort at self- 
preservation. It is as natural for a state to 
wish to preserve its political freedom and cul- 
tural independence as for an individual to wish 
to preserve his life. Such a motive all men 
comprehend. 

It is the attitudes of England and Germany 
that are really crucial from the American point 
of view. The Pan-Slavism of Russia and the 
nationalism of the attacked states are rela- 
tively simple and comprehensible motives. 
Even the warring nations seem to recognize 
this. The one conspicuous misunderstanding 
in this present war is as between England and 
Germany, and the degree of this misunder- 
standing is reflected in the intensity of the 
animosity which these two nations entertain 
for one another. English feeling against Aus- 
tria is slight; it is all directed against the 
German Government and the ideals the 
English believe this government to stand for. 
Similarly, German hatred of England in the 
present conflict is far more intense than is 
even her loathing for the Slavs, while to France 
she Is relatively kindly. Now, each of these 
powers, England and Germany, is proclaim- 
ing this war to be a war in defence of civi- 
lization; their fundamental difference is ob- 
viously a difference in their conceptions of 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

civilization. In the claims of both on this 
question we must find the materials for our 
final judgement. 

First, a caution. Let us not judge either 
nation from the vituperation heaped upon it 
by the other. No sane American believes 
that England is, as the Germans say, a lie- 
factory, governed only by envy, deceit, and 
malice. No sane American believes that Ger- 
many's war is, as some of the English seem to 
hold, merely the expression of a military caste 
dominated by a malignant thirst for English 
blood and lust of English gold. On the con- 
trary, we all believe that each nation is fight- 
ing with an ardent and whole-souled convic- 
tion of the righteousness of its cause. So be- 
lieving, it is our obvious duty to accept the 
statements of the representative men of each 
nation as to what they are fighting for. Each 
side is free to present, and is presenting its 
case without damage from the other. Between 
them we must decide. 

What, then, is the cause of each, as each 
understands it? Here I can only present an 
opinion — my private opinion — formed from 
the several manifestoes of the two peoples. 

England's contentions, as expressed by her 
scholars and statesmen, I should formulate 
in some such propositions as these: 

(i) Small states have a right to independent 
development. That is, the culture of the world, 
on the whole, profits by local diversifications. 
This is the main point of James Bryce's recent 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

discussion of England's cause. It is the ex- 
plicit statement of the group of Oxford scholars 
who have published their analysis of Why We 
Are at War. An article in the London Times 
of September 17 states it as follows: "There 
is, for nations as for men, an everlasting 
orthodoxy of doctrine that becomes clearer 
as they live by it. . . . Now the essence of the 
orthodox doctrine, both for men and for 
nations, is that they should not ask themselves 
whether they are inferior or superior in any 
respect to this or that people, but that they 
should have their own idea of excellence and 
pursue that without rivalry, or envy, or con- 
tempt. " This, as we shall see, is the direct op- 
posite of the view of the public men of Ger- 
many, — at any rate, of those now conspicuous. 

(2) Treaty pledges should be subject to the 
same code as is the word of the individual. 
This is not maintained because all treaties are 
good, but for the reason that the English be- 
lieve that the world's growing respect for 
treaties (and I suppose no Englishman will 
deny that this respect is a recent growth for 
his own as for other countries) is furnishing 
us our only real advance toward a world-polity 
in which war shall be of the past. "The faith 
of treaties is the only solid foundation on 
which the temple of peace can be built up," 
says James Bryce, and we have no reason to 
doubt that he and other Englishmen believe 
this. 

(3) Democracies, the rulership of the people 



LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

of the world, can only be developed from the 
locality outwards. The world cannot be de- 
mocratized by empire, but only by the slow 
growth of national self-consciousnesses. That 
the British Empire is a kind of anomaly, the 
English concede (just as is our own dominion 
over the Filipinos); but they point to the 
fact that decentralization, the recognition of 
local rights and local modes of thought — 
home rule in Ireland, native art in India, etc. 
— are gradually redeeming the Empire of its 
own faults, inherited from the past. In other 
words, the British empire of to-day is not the 
British empire of 1776. 

Such are the English ideals as the English 
state them. I confess that the German motive 
is not equally clear to me. Certain aspects of 
it are, however, obvious, and I will try to sum- 
marize them, trusting for my evidence to the 
published statements of the protagonists of 
Germany's cause. 

(i) Germany stands for firm belief in higher 
and lower cultures, and the intense assurance 
that German culture is by right of quality a 
higher and dominating culture. This is evi- 
denced by the German White Paper itself 
which reprints newspaper criticism of Servians 
of every class, officials, professors, teachers, 
and guarantees to Austria an entirely free 
hand in her action against Servia. Rudolf 
Eucken, the great philosopher, characterizes 
Slavic antipathy to Germany as the " rage and 
hatred of a lower culture against a higher." 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

Professor Muensterberg, the Kaiser's Harvard 
friend, says: "This is a war of Russian bru- 
tahty against German culture, — Germany is 
fighting the battle of western civilization 
against the Slav and barbarism." 

(2) Germany stands for the belief that a 
growing nation has rights greater than are the 
rights established by the law of nations, — 
that is, that assurances secured from strong 
peoples by alien and weaker states are sub- 
ordinate to the necessities of a growing people. 
"We demand our place in the sun," is the 
Kaiser's picturesque statement of this doc- 
trine, which was long ago put more baldly by 
Bismarck: "The time for neutral states is 
past. You (Crispi) can see that in the case of 
Switzerland where they arrest my agents. 
The state, like the individual, must be re- 
sponsible for its actions," {Crispi Memoirs^ 
May, 1889). Professor Muensterberg aims to 
give a biological-sociological formulation of 
the same doctrine: "The world's progress has 
depended at all times upon the expansive 
ascendency of the sound, strong, solid, and 
able nations and the shrinking of those which 
have lost their healthy qualities and have 
become unfit and decadent." 

(3) A third German conviction, what the 
British really mean by Prussian militarism, 
is represented by a group of doctrines difficult 
to characterize simply. For example, the 
Kaiser's. statement that "the army is the main 
tower of strength for my country, the main 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

pillar supporting the Prussian throne, to which 
God in his wisdom has called me. " Or again, 
Treitschke's oft-quoted statement that "God 
will see to it that war always recurs as a dras- 
tic medicine for the human race. " 

All of these conceptions might be summed up 
under the phrase Pan-Germanism, understood 
no longer as a purely political conception of 
the unification of the German peoples, but as an 
intense, Hebrew-like conviction that Germany 
is a chosen nation and the German people a 
chosen people for the redemption of the world. 

The case is before you as I see it and as I 
believe most Americans see it. Each people is 
appealing, with all the sincerity at its com- 
mand, for our judgement of the righteousness 
of its cause. Our answer can only be given in 
the strength of our social and political con- 
victions, in the light of our judgement as to 
what should be the future of the human race. 
Shall ours be a world state, dominated by the 
spirit and ideals of the German people, by a 
Pax Germanica and a Lex Germanica, or shall 
it be a confederacy of races and peoples in 
emulous and uneven strife for the achieve- 
ment of the best gift, the highest excellence? 
Shall there be a world empire or a world de- 
mocracy? I believe that our treatment of 
Cuba and Mexico, our promises to the Fili- 
pinos, have indicated the only answer that 
we can give. 

October, 191 4. 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

III 

THE WAR AND EUROPEAN 
CIVILIZATION. 

What we commonly speak of as 'European 
civilization ' is the body of political ideas and 
institutions, social and economic customs, lit- 
eratures, arts, and sciences, which, originating 
and developed in Europe, have now been spread 
by conquest, commerce, colonization, and pros- 
elytizing over the greater part of the habitable 
earth. The Christian religion is the most uni- 
versal and characteristic feature of this civi- 
lization; which is hence often spoken of as 
'Christian civilization,' or briefly as 'Christen- 
dom. ' The only civilizations greatly competing 
with the Christian for the control of the human 
race are the Buddhist and the Muslim, both 
centralized in the southern half of the continent 
of Asia. So far as the political control of the 
globe or the general development of human 
institutions is concerned, these Asiatic cul- 
tures are at the present day of little import- 
ance; they are not conspicuously expansive 
in either a material or an intellectual sense; 
they have been, in fact, for_ a range of cen- 
turies quiescent or retrogressive. Seen by the 
eye of ages, we live in the world's Christian 

era. . . 

If we ask more narrowly after the origm 
and character of European civilization, we 
can point to a few great historic movements. 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

European culture took its rise in the eastern 
Mediterranean, in close contact with Egypt 
and the great Asiatic states of antiquity. 
It first received its distinctively European 
character in what Herodotus calls the quarrel 
of Europe and Asia, — the wars of the city 
states of ancient Greece to preserve their in- 
dependence against the threatening domina- 
tion of Asiatic Persians. The success of this 
defence of the freedom of Hellas crystallized 
Greek national consciousness and presaged 
the splendid development of Hellenic intellect 
which makes the fifth century before Christ 
secularly the greatest of the world's centuries. 
On the foundations of this Hellenic civiliza- 
tion of antiquity rests all that is best and 
most characteristic in Europe's art, literature, 
science, and philosophy; and indeed the stu- 
dent of Greek thought is continuously im- 
pressed with the fact that already in its first 
bloom it defined for us the salient outlines of 
all our significant ideas; we have done little 
more than add illustration to the truths the 
Greeks discovered. Nevertheless, European 
civilization owes to antiquity two elements 
which the Greeks could not contribute, — - the 
two elements which alone have made the uni- 
versalizing of Greek thought possible. From 
Rome it has derived the great conception of a 
formal civil law; the conception that men are 
not merely the toys of a whimsical nature or 
the tools of a responsible providence, but that 
they are themselves givers of law and makers 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

of institutions, — and this is an idea which, I 
believe, has never touched any other civiUza- 
tion. From Judea, a country which was only 
by accident of geography Asiatic, for its whole 
historical influence has been westward, Europe 
derived the Christian religion, which in a 
special sense it has made the seal and sanction 
of its culture. These three, Greek thought, 
Roman law, the Christian religion, have from 
antiquity given the civilization of Europe its 
distinctive character. 

The heritage of antiquity — the soul of 
European culture — has been given its modern 
form — the body of that culture — by two 
groups of nations of western Europe, the 
Latin nations and the Teutonic nations. Let 
me point out that this division is more strik- 
ingly linguistic than racial. While in a broad 
way it is true that the Teutons are northerly 
and blond, and the Latins southerly and bru- 
net, nevertheless, it has long been recog- 
nized by ethnologists that there are no pure 
races in Europe, and that the region from the 
valley of the Po to the Baltic and westward 
through the British Isles is peopled by a hope- 
less criss-cross of human breeds; the most that 
can be said of one section or another is that it 
shows a predominant strain of this blood or 
that. 

Among these Latin and Teutonic nations, 
four have emerged in the progress of time 
as the especial standard-bearers of Europe's 
civilization. These are, of course, Italy, 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

France, England, and Germany. In men- 
tioning these four, I do not wish to be 
thought unmindful of what other states have 
done, — Spain, Scandinavia, and the Slavonic 
countries, — but I think it certain that no 
student of the history of culture will seriously 
contest the assertion that all the most signifi- 
cant elements of European culture as it exists 
to-day are represented by the speakers of 
Italian, French, German, and English. If evi- 
dence be needed, the mere fact that these 
four languages are to-day the universally 
recognized languages of learning, and that 
some acquaintance with each of them is de- 
manded of everyone who pretends to scholar- 
ship, should set the matter at rest. 

If we ask what is the distinctive contribu- 
tion of each of these nations to the world's 
culture, the answer is not immediate. Prob- 
ably it may be best thrown in perspective by 
falling back upon our broader linguistic dis- 
tinction. The Latin nations, Italy and France, 
have been and are the world's leaders and 
teachers in the fine arts — architecture, paint- 
ing, sculpture. These two nations have also 
been the form-givers of western culture; litera- 
ture, drama, science, politics, personal and 
public manners, even food and dress, have 
derived whatever of elegance and urbanity 
they possess from Italy and France. Finally, 
it is to these two countries again that we 
owe our most penetrating political and social 
philosophy. Italian humanism and French 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

humanitarianism have deeply coloured all 
modern life, and have opened the way to the 
conception of a civilization catholic of all 
mankind. 

It can hardly be denied that the Teutonic 
gift is outwardly less imposing. Its first and, 
as I think, its noblest contribution has been 
its love of truth. If the Latins have given us 
the forms of culture, surely its spiritual sub- 
stance is to be found in that stubborn inde- 
pendence of spirit which has created British 
political freedom and which was the soul of 
the German reformation of religion. Chris- 
tianity was the first great democratic move- 
ment in human history — indeed, the only 
great democratic movement. Yet the Latins 
could only make of it a kind of other-world 
empire, a city of God; it remained for the 
countrymen of Wyclif and Luther to derive 
from Christian teachings that democracy of 
life which in Germany has taken the form of 
an intellectual, in England of a political free- 
dom. The same Teutonic love of the substance 
of truth is to be seen again, I think, in the 
distinctive character of English and German 
science and letters; in science the Germans 
have been noted above other peoples for 
labourious and painstaking compilation, for 
research; the English have been the founders 
of the experimental method. In literature, 
neither German nor Briton has attained Latin 
elegance and lucidity, while for majesty and 
richness of thought only one Latinic poet, 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

Dante, has approached Shakespeare or Milton 
or Goethe. The substance of the practical 
Hfe, too, has been immensely furthered by the 
commerce, manufactures, and inventions of 
England and Germany. 

It would be uselessly invidious to try to cast 
up the several accounts of these nations, to 
say which is first, which should be last in the 
estimation of humanity. As culture groups 
they are of nearly equal age; the tenth and 
eleventh centuries of our era saw each of them 
assuming its special cast. From the point of 
view of world history — in comparison, say, to 
Persian or Hindu or Chinese — all of them are 
young; and there is neither point nor truth 
in calling any one of them decadent. To-day, 
all four represent the frontal of civilization, 
and it would be calamitous indeed to suppose 
that any one of them had passed its period 
of helpfulness to mankind. 

And yet the events of this year of our Lord 
1914 cannot but cause a thinking man to ask 
himself whether this very calamity may not 
have befallen not merely one, but all of these 
peoples; whether the present fratricidal war 
of European countries may not mark the close 
of the period of Europe's leadership of the 
civilization of the world, and hence the begin- 
ning of a New World epoch. I do not wish to 
appear as a prophet of evil, but it becomes 
every man to face the truth. 

War is an agency of destruction. It destroys 
vigorous human life; it destroys men's handi- 

ig8 



LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

work; it drains the generation engaged in it 
of energy and power; and in using up the 
wealth, the capital of the world, it depletes 
the energy of immediately succeeding genera- 
tions, for wealth capitalized is merely the out- 
ward symbol of that power for work passed 
from generation to generation which makes 
human progress possible; capital is the poten- 
tial energy of mankind. War destroys all of 
these things, — life, work, power for work; 
this, I think, is undeniable. It is true that 
war, in a certain sense, may be the preserver 
of mankind. Nations are justified, we believe, 
in waging war for the preservation of human 
freedom; they are justified in waging war in 
defence of the truth, and in defence of that 
special form of truth which is the nation's 
troth or plighted word; they may be justified, 
again, in waging an offensive war for the 
propagation of ideals which they hold to be 
deeply sacred, and which must else suffer 
defeat. All of these causes are recognized by 
mankind as justifying the appeal to arms, 
for they are deemed to be causes grounded in 
the inalienable rights of the human soul. Nev- 
ertheless, it is to be noted that each of these 
causes is a defensive, not a constructive cause. 
War cannot create, though it may preserve; 
and the sense in which war is justifiable to the 
moral intelligence is exactly the sense in which 
surgery, amputation, is justifiable for the 
health of the human body; it preserves life, 
even while it depletes and mutilates it. War, 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

in its best light, is still a destructive agency. 
The degree of destruction which the present 
war will entail, no man can foresee. Even if 
it is waged until one or more of the great states 
is forever crushed, as the combatants mu- 
tually threaten, its full effects can hardly be- 
come apparent in our own generation. Civi- 
lizations are measured by centuries; they do 
not die in a day. After this war is ended, we 
shall certainly see the various European 
states, now engaged in mutual injury, working 
mutually for the repair of this injury. There 
will be houses and bridges and roads to be re- 
built; countries to be rehabilitated and re- 
populated; an immense and engrossing eco- 
nomic activity. There will be a resumption of 
educational and scientific activities, though 
the immediately practical nature of the re- 
construction called for will insure that these 
activities be practical rather than theoretical, 
in the nature of applications rather than of 
discoveries. There may be, also, the creation 
of a vivid art, literary and pictorial, directly 
inspired by the combat; though, like all art 
so inspired, its values must be historical rather 
than eternal. All of these activities are likely 
to follow this war, and to present to us the 
spectacle of a Europe energetically active, 
aggressive at once in politics, economics, and 
letters. And yet such an activity, — for the 
man who can see beneath the superficial moil, 
who can see his own day in the perspective of 
God's years, — such an activity may be noth- 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

ing more, and is all too likely to be nothing 
more than the iridescence of the decay of 
European civilization. The shell of culture 
will remain, glittering and beautiful, but the 
living spirit will have been stolen away. 

Such, I say, may be the result, and in some 
degree must be the result of the present war. 
People have rallied from disastrous wars in 
the past (though we must not forget that 
people have also been destroyed by them, and 
whole civilizations buried for centuries), and 
Europe may in a degree rally from this war. 
But it is inconceivable that she can be re- 
stored in her entirety; something of her old 
pre-eminence will certainly be lost to her, in 
all probability forever. Never before have 
such numbers of men, such quantities of 
wealth, been devoted to destructive combat; 
and while it is true that the world and Europe 
are more populous and wealthier than ever 
before, it is altogether probable that a war 
waged in the murderous spirit of this combat 
entails a consumption of resources, in life, 
wealth, energy, out of all proportion to the 
natural increase of these energies. We must 
face an era of a physically and spiritually im- 
poverished Europe. 

In view of this, what is our duty.? What is 
our task as a nation and as individuals ? What 
is our position in time and space, — in the 
history and geography of this planet. Earth.? 
We must face an era of a physically and spir- 
itually impoverished Europe. . . . Can I utter 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

graver words, or invite to soberer thought? 
Heretofore, for all the higher needs of human- 
ity, we have lived upon the patrimony of 
Europe. We have turned to her for our sci- 
ence, our art, our letters, our political and 
social thought; she has been at once parent 
and mentor, the giver of gifts spiritual, for 
which we have returned the natural duties 
of offspring. If I may enlarge upon the figure, 
we have been like a youth sent out to try the 
world, relying upon a stipend from home. 
But the time for these things is past; hence- 
forth we must be dependent upon our own 
powers; the struggle of maturity, the creative 
struggle, is before us. 

What is our position in space and time, — 
in Earth's geography, conceived as a distribu- 
tion of civilizations, and in Earth's history, 
conceived as the unfoldment of man's better 
powers? If you will form to the mind's eye 
a conception of our globe's surface, you will 
have before you the configuration of those 
continents and seas which are the theatres of 
men's affairs. Europe is the least of the con- 
tinents; her civilization has been the civiliza- 
tion of the least of the intercontinental seas, 
the Mediterranean. Is it thinkable that the 
habitable globe can be forever dominated from 
European centres; that a London or a Berlin 
can play for the whole world the part that 
Rome so long played for Europe itself? The 
question is answered in the asking; and it is 
answered again by the world-map itself. On 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

this world-map it is evident at once that 
America, and more particularly that part of 
America where its northern and southern 
continents thin to an almost symbolic union, — 
from the map it is evident that America is the 
key to the strategy of the seas. What this 
means in the large, a little imagination will 
foresee; the seas are the burden-bearers of 
mankind; they have made commerce possible, 
on a world scale; and commerce is but the 
outer sign of that inward traffic of the spirit, 
that communion of man with man, nation with 
nation, which is the supreme agent of human 
progress. Civilization has never, in the world's 
history, had its centres far from the littoral, 
and I cannot but think that the Panama 
Canal, in bringing the littorals of the nations 
nearer to one another than they have ever 
been before, as near together as they ever can 
be brought, marks the last great shift in the 
geographic centre of civilization. The two 
great events of our generation are the opening 
of this canal and the contemporary debacle of 
Europe, events which have a strangely dra- 
matic relation to one another, the one as mark- 
ing the beginning of a new, the other as mark- 
ing the decay of an old centre of civilization. 
But geography is not the sole determinant 
of men's destinies, nor of the greatness of 
nations. We should view our position as a 
sobering responsibility rather than as an 
assurance of vainglory. That the American 
continent is one day to be the seat of a great 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

civilization, I have no doubt; that that civi- 
lization is to be the achievement of our race, 
that it is to be the continuation and fruition 
of the civilization of Europe, I hope; but we 
can be certain only of this, that if our race 
fails, some other will succeed, as we have suc- 
ceeded the Indian, to our geographical heri- 
tage. And let us view the task before us with 
a mind humbly aware of deep insufficiencies. 
As a people, we cannot pretend to have at- 
tained the level of civilization which yester- 
day was Europe's; as I have said, spiritually 
we have been living upon the European patri- 
mony of our race. Furthermore, a student of 
the history of culture must, it seems to me, 
concede that intellectually Europe herself is 
only now attaining to the level of her own 
Hellenic source. It is a saying of scholars that 
not until the nineteenth century did the in- 
telligence of Europe reach a point where it 
could comprehend the intelligence of the 
Greeks, and it is not pretended that the crea- 
tive powers of the average Italian or French- 
man or Englishman or German of our day can 
vie with those of the average Athenian of the 
age of Pericles. It has taken Europe more than 
two millenia to rise to a point of culture where 
it can comprehendingly view its own high 
source. This my own study of philosophy 
daily confirms into conviction, and if the total 
spectacle of European history is thus one of an 
essential decline, intellectually, where indeed 
must we put our own place, still in parental 

20 ]. 



LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

leading-strings? Let us not cant of progress 
until we have proven our powers of compre- 
hension. 

And now let me say a word in regard to the 
concrete problems which we must face. I said 
above that, after this war, we shall in all prob- 
ability be presented with the spectacle of a 
Europe intensely active in its economic, sci- 
entific, and literary life. But if, as seems to me 
certainly necessary, this life is largely recon- 
structive rather than constructive; if its eco- 
nomics is an effort to replace wasted capital, its 
science devoted to material problems and 
local applications, its literature and art and 
scholarship historical and retrospective rather 
than creative and prophetic in character, — • 
if these altogether probable outcomes occupy 
what is then left of European energy, we must 
not be duped by the outward spectacle into 
the feeling that it stands for an inward and 
positive progress. Let us rather remember 
that the task of an advancing civilization is 
the immensely laborious one of intellectual 
and spiritual discovery; that theoretic, not 
practical, science is the true gauge of even 
economic progress; that literature and art 
must have eternal values for the human soul 
if they are to measure up to the greatness of 
the past; and finally that the painful and 
often thankless labour of scholarship is the 
one sure guarantee of the spiritual freedom of 
mankind. For more than two thousand years 
Europe has pointed earth's way in these ac- 

20 1; 



LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

tivities. Now it is ours, if our race have the 
spirit, to succeed to the parent's toils. 

November y 1914. 

IV 
THE WAR AND CHRISTIANITY. 

Europe's other name is Christendom. Her 
civilization is the Christian civilization, and 
the soul of that civilization and its most uni- 
versal trait is the Christian religion which all 
European nations profess. A general war 
which involves the four most powerful Euro- 
pean nations, and the greater and most highly 
civilized portion of her inhabitants, such a 
war, when hugely waged between these na- 
tions themselves, Christian against Christian, 
cannot but appear to the rest of the world as 
a fearful test of the fundamental soundness 
of Europe's culture, and especially as a test, 
as by fire, of the genuineness and vitality of 
the Christian religion. In the war in Europe 
Christianity is on trial before the world. 

One of the phases of this war which has 
been taken up by our American press in a 
cynical or an ironical mood has been the com- 
mon appeal of the warring nations to the one 
Christian god. The royal and imperial heads 
of these states have each and all sent forth 
their soldiers to fight, trusting to the Almighty 
God, the God of their Fathers, the God of 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

righteousness, for victory and salvation; and 
to many Americans there has seemed to be a 
kind of blasphemy in this, or at least an in- 
sincerity. For myself, I see in it no insincerity, 
no trace of mere formalism. When the aged 
Emperor of Austria asked the Pope to bless 
the arms of his country, whose rule for cen- 
turies bore the proud title of Holy Roman 
Empire, I believe him to have been deeply 
sincere. When the King of England com- 
manded his soldiers to fear only the Lord, I 
believe him to have been deeply sincere. I 
believe, too, in the sincerity of the Czar of all 
the Russias as he blessed the holy ikons, the 
images of the Lord, which his regiments were 
to bear before them into battle. And I do not 
for a moment question the earnestness of the 
Kaiser of Germany in saying, "God has been 
on our side and has most brilliantly aided us. " 
I do not question the honesty of these senti- 
ments when they are expressed by the rulers 
of Europe, for I find daily confirmation of 
the fact that all the peoples of the struggling 
states are as deeply moved by religious feeling 
as are their kings and rulers. Men do not face 
death in a jocular or cynical mood; and men 
here are facing the possible death of nations, 
as well as the certain extermination of mul- 
titudes of their beloved. In fact, press and 
returning traveller alike are to-day telling of 
a grave and solemn religious spirit in the 
churches of every nation in Europe; the lights 
and the gaiety are gone from the gay capitals, 

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and in the presence of horrible affliction her 
peoples are seeking before the altars the con- 
solations of the spirit. At the battle-front it 
is the same. We read of the czar-blessed ikons 
borne by priests at the head of charging 
moujiks. We read of a British regiment kneel- 
ing for a moment's prayer before making a 
supreme effort, that the men know means 
annihilation. We read of the Germans in their 
weltering trenches keeping the Sabbath with 
hymns of Christ even while the shrapnel is 
hailing about them. An American who en- 
tered Reims Cathedral during the bombard- 
ment gives this terrible picture, terrible and 
beautiful as faith is always beautiful: 

"Shells fell upon the prisoners, killing three 
or four and wounding others . . . the latter 
painfully dragging their bodies over the straw 
like gray-coloured snakes. Every now and 
again the half light in the Cathedral was lit 
by the white glare of a breaking shell. Four 
Sisters of Mercy also lay dead on the floor of 
the Cathedral, their white faces set with the 
sublimity of their faith. All around were the 
figures of kneeling women, their lips moving 
in fervent prayer. Apparently they were 
beseeching intercession from St. Joan of Arc, 
whose beautiful figure, crowned with white 
flowers, and looking ethereally calm in the 
tumult, was untouched by shot and shell. " 

In scenes such as these there is no question 
of sincerity. The men and women of Europe, 
like men and women since the world began, in 

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the hour of their helplessness and tribulation 
turn inevitably to that God whose children 
they have been taught to believe they are; 
and it may well be that one consequence of 
this terrible war will be an intensification and 
a purification of the religious life of the Euro- 
pean peoples. But from another point of 
view, for us who are far enough away to view 
the course of events with less passion, there 
are questions of the highest moment for the 
world's religious life, which the European 
conflict must raise. 

First among these, I should put the question 
as to the real meaning and message of Chris- 
tianity: is it a religion that countenances, 
nay, demands war under certain circum- 
stances? Is such a thing thinkable as a holy 
and Christian war.? Do not respond with a 
too-hasty negative; it is easy for us, remote 
from the conflict, to denounce war and say 
that it belies the Gospels. But a religion must 
be judged by its history, by its fruits; and the 
history of Europe is scarred by many a war 
waged in the name of Christ. Charlemagne 
baptized the Saxons in the blood of battle 
before he baptized them Christians; the 
Crusades were one splendid apotheosis of 
Christ and militarism, — the sword and the 
cross of Europe against the scimitar and cres- 
cent of Asia; the wars of the Reformation, 
bloody and savage beyond description, were 
all in the name of Christ; and it was with the 
name of Christ upon their lips, and venera- 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

tion of the church in their hearts, that the 
stout conquistadores came across the seas 
from Spain to hew Christian empires from the 
pagan body of America. We have no right 
to judge Christianity solely by our private 
convictions or to say that a religion in whose 
name so much blood has been shed Is entirely 
a religion of peace. 

Europe is Christian; Europe is at war; and 
the zeal that animates its warfare is, in part at 
least, the zeal of religious faith. And yet we 
believe, we Americans, that the Christian re- 
ligion is a religion of peace and good-will and 
brotherly kindness. How are we to reconcile 
this seeming contradiction; and again how 
is it to be reconciled to the keen and inquiring 
minds of non-Christian Asla.^ Christianity is 
on trial at the tribunal of the world's reason, 
and it is no light task to make good her de- 
fence. 

For my own part, I will undertake only an 
historical suggestion, for the full solution 
must be left to the eventful future of the Chris- 
tian world. At the foundation of Christianity, 
as you know, lie an Old and a New Dispensa- 
tion. The God of the Old Dispensation is, I 
suppose, in every man's mind a God of justice 
and righteousness and wrath; a God jealous of 
his due, who chastens the spirit of the haughty, 
who tries his servants with affliction, who pun- 
ishes the erring, who speaks his anger from the 
cloud. Such a God is indeed a God of battles 
and of battling hosts 1 In contrast, the God of 

2IO 



LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

the New Dispensation is a loving father, in- 
finitely sorrowful of sin, infinitely forgiving, 
infinitely compassionate of human suffering. 
His minister is the dove of peace and peace ot 
the spirit is his most precious gift to mankind. 
There, in contrast, are the Old and the New 
Dispensations, as most of us understand them. 
We say that the New Dispensation has re- 
placed the Old, not only in the order of time 
but as an article of faith and as the essence of 
religion. I ask, has it indeed replaced the Old 
Dispensation, wholly replaced it in Christen- 
dom itself? Does the history of Christian 
nations show that the Old Dispensation is 
transcended f Is there not in Christian nations 
to-day a deep recognition of the old Hebraic 
God of Battles .f* And is not this, in part at 
least, the religion that countenances the pres- 
ent terrible war.f* 

Certainly, there is something of the noble 
patriotism of the prophets of old, — a patriot- 
ism founded in a deep conviction that their 
people had been chosen to an inestimable mis- 
sion, — there is something of this patriotism 
in the attitude of the German people to-day. 
"When an entire nation is inflamed and ele- 
vated by the same thought, that of being the 
bearer and instrument of a higher order of 
things," this, says Rudolf Eucken, is the 
noblest of impulses, and he proclaims that "to 
us (the Germans) more than to any other 
nation is intrus'-ed the true structure of human 
existence." "The task of civilization is in- 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

cumbent upon us by the decree of providence," 
are the words of another spokesman of the 
empire, General von Schellendorf; and it is 
difficult for us to see the German Kaiser, 
anointed of the Lord, as he believes himself to 
be, in any other light than as a kind of Joshua 
leading his people into a greater Canaan. 

If this be true of the Germans, can we doubt 
that it is, in its measure, true of the other 
warring nations; that each of them believes 
in itself, as a power for good and as a vessel of 
human welfare, with something of the same 
Hebraic steadfastness and something of the 
same reverence for the God of Israel who is 
also the God of battles ? Such a conviction will 
go far to explain how all of the warring nations 
are entering the conflict strong in their faith 
that God is with them. 

Warring Europe is still Christian Europe, 
but its Christianity is even yet largely the 
stern and implacable law of the Old Dispensa- 
tion. I do not wish to imply that the spirit of 
the New Dispensation has in no wise gained 
way; every student of history must recognize 
its influence in the fine chivalry which tem- 
pered the barbarity of mediaeval times, in the 
slow but sure expansion of the democratic 
belief in the rights of the individual soul, and 
again in that sentiment of humanity which in 
late years has been wonderfully spreading 
among the children of men; and every stu- 
dent of history will, I believe, agree that in 
these is to be founded the most vital distinc- 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

tion of Christian culture. But in spite of all 
this the fearful war that is now being waged in 
Christian Europe cannot but bring home to 
our imaginations the little distance, the very 
little distance, that Europe has advanced in 
the direction of the religion of peace. 

And yet,— let us seize hope even from the 
midst of discouragement,— and yet may it 
not be that this combat of titans represents 
the last expression of the old spirit, the last 
deed of the Old Dispensation .f* May it not be 
that, as a disease sometimes lurks in the sys- 
tem through long discomfort which can only 
be fully relieved and purified by the final fever, 
the fever of war in Europe to-day represents 
the last troubled outbreak of this inner con- 
tradiction at the core of our civilization.'' At 
least, there is consolation in this thought. 

It is but a few years since there died in 
Russia a grey old man who, more than any 
man of his century, stood before the European 
world as the symbol and apostle of the New 
Dispensation. He preached human brother- 
hood, as it has rarely been preached before, 
and he pled with the nations that they purge 
themselves of idle conceits and envious rival- 
ries. In his last days he seemed to recognize 
a kind of fatuity in his own mission, for even 
while he preached the gospel of peace and non- 
resistance, he prophesied war; with a kind of 
inevitableness which has caught the imagina- 
tion of all men, he prophesied the very con- 
flagration of all Europe which is now raging. 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

And yet his prophecy did not stop with war; 
for out of and beyond the struggle he saw arise 
a great confederacy of nations, — the nations 
of the earth, — hand in hand, engaged in the 
great work of civilization, which is the eternal 
work of human redemption. Such was the 
vision of Leon Tolstoy, the greatest Christian 
of the New Dispensation in our generation. 

I have set before you the religious problem 
of the war, as I conceive it, historically. There 
is yet another problem which the war cannot 
but make vivid in men's minds, if anything, 
of even more moment for religion. This is a 
metaphysical problem, to which I might well 
devote many lectures, but which now I can 
only indicate. 

The problem I speak of is the problem of the 
strength of evil and of the real seriousness of 
man's spiritual life. In times of peaceful pros- 
perity, religion tends all too easily to degen- 
erate into an empty formalism or indeed into 
a hardly less empty emotionalism; it loses its 
application to life, and hence its seriousness 
and earnestness. Under such circumstances 
we begin to doubt whether we have in us, after 
all, the stuff from which martyrs are made, 
whether our eyes are not hopelessly dimmed 
to spiritual truth. But in times of great tribu- 
lation — times of war and plague and famine, 
cataclysms of iire and flood, — we find men, 
under stress, rising to the measure of the faith 
that is in them, and discovering thereby in 
their own natures unsuspected nobilities. 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

Attila, the Hun, called himself the * scourge of 
God' with, I suspect, something of the same 
conviction that causes a nineteenth century 
political philosopher, Treitschke, to proclaim 
that "God will see to it that war always recurs 
as a drastic medicine for the human race." 
There is an argument here, gaining a kind of 
support from history itself, to the effect that 
it is only under such terrible conditions as war 
entails that the spiritual nature of man is 
stimulated to its highest realization, — con- 
sequently sanctioning war for the sake of the 
divinity that is in man. "It is like getting a 
glimpse into depths of the human soul hid- 
den from sight at other times," says Eucken; 
"such trials make infinitely more out of us, 
they arm us even against the worst perils." 
War thus becomes a kind of sacrament, a gift 
of the blood and of the body for the sake of 
spiritual life. 

As I said, I can do little more than raise this 
problem, which is in my opinion one deserv- 
ing the serious thought of every man. But I 
would add a few considerations touching the 
applications of it to the mission of the church 
as this is ordinarily conceived. We speak of 
the religion of Christ as a religion of peace; 
and I think that we justly so speak of it. 
Nevertheless, we speak of the earthly church 
as the church militant; and again I think that 
we speak justly. How shall we reconcile this 
seeming contradiction? I would answer with 
another question. Is it not true that the reli- 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

glon of the New Dispensation is a religion of 
peace among men, as between human brethren; 
and does it breathe aught save the most un- 
compromising militancy" against that dark 
and barbarous other-world of sinful and 
brutish nature which is repeatedly and for- 
ever threatening and encroaching upon man's 
spiritual domain? There is a war against the 
barbarism of nature which it is ours to wage, 
and which, in its waging, evokes the noblest 
qualities of which men are capable, — enter- 
prise, heroism, self-sacrifice. Of all the cata- 
clysms that afflict mankind, plague, famine, 
flood, fire, earthquake, war, only the last is 
man-made; and if we should redeem ourselves 
of human warfare, as I believe that we shall, 
these other trials will still remain for us to 
combat as long as human beings shall inhabit 
this earth. The battle-cry of a war for which 
none of us are, I imagine, too proud was, 'Re- 
member the Maine ' ; for the war of the future, 
the war of all mankind against a none too 
friendly earthly environment, I should sub- 
stitute another cry. Remembering those men 
who went down to their death at night in the 
icy waters of the north Atlantic, who went 
down to their death masters of their own souls, 
I should make the battle-cry of the future to 
be, 'Remember the Titanic!' 

Man against nature is a warfare which can 
never cease until human life ceases, and it is a 
warfare which throughout the generations of 
mankind will continue to put men to the test 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

and to bring forth the noblest of which they 
are capable. Nor is this war wholly an external 
one. In our own bodies and souls there is an 
old and a new dispensation, never at rest to- 
gether, never compatible one with the other. 
The struggle of the spirit and the flesh this has 
been called, and it has taken on many forms in 
the course of human history. Its proper form 
in our own day is, I believe, a stout resistance 
of the sloth and luxury and arrogance which 
material wealth engenders; and it may well be 
that the terrific destruction of wealth as well 
as of life on the richest of Earth's continents, 
which is daily before our eyes, will yet reveal 
to our vision something more preciously 
human than either material possessions or 
bodily life, the power of men's souls to suffer 
for their faiths. While the human race exists 
the church that commands men's hearts will 
continue to be a militant church, Christianity 
a militant Christianity, though the wars 
which it will wage will certainly cease to be 
wars of men against men, but will rather be- 
come crusades of the spirit against that stain 
of evil whose source is deep in the universe. 

November, 1914. 



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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

V 

THE WAR AND THE PROBLEMS 
OF LIFE 

More than a year has passed since Europe 
was stricken with war, and the horror of the 
event has hourly grown in intensity. The 
shock of amazement, that such a thing could 
be, which greeted the outbreak of the war, has 
given place to a settled acceptance of the grim 
fact; but this settled acceptance makes the 
thing itself no less black. Rather, in showing 
us how foolish and vain were our idealizations 
of a civilization we deemed above ambitious 
murder, it has brought to us a graver and 
darker sense of the problems that beset the 
life we must live. 

Here in Nebraska, the past summer, sur- 
rounded by quiet pastures and gloriously 
green fields, the war has seemed like some 
uncanny mirage lifting above the crest of 
our horizons its unreal images of maddened 
death. On the streets we have met the good- 
humoured countenances of our fellowmen; in 
the fields, the smiles of a generous nature; 
and we have all been pacifists at heart. But 
daily our eyes have been lifted to the lurid 
glow of war, — constrained to behold, in spite 
of us; and we have ended with a double sense 
of illusion, not knowing whether the reality 
lay most in the peace which greets our physical 
vision or in the red images revealed to our 
intelligence. 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

Again the University opens, outwardly as 
in other years; but the youth who are crowd- 
ing its halls represent the generation upon 
which most heavily must fall the consequences 
of a war which is transforming the destinies 
of the world. Future generations of students 
will study the records of the conflict, as those 
of to-day study the past; and generation by 
generation its meaning will become clearer and 
easier to master. But none of them will have 
more need of understanding than have the 
youth of to-day, for whom the war is creat- 
ing the new conditions of a new life, — and 
for none will understanding be so dearly 
bought. 

There are those who think that America 
can be affected by the war, if at all, only 
favourably. This is a crass and fatal view. 
Wiseacre veterans of the Civil War have been 
telling us that the copious rains of the past 
summer are the reverberation of Old World 
cannonadings; battles bring rains, they say. 
And this view — however fantastic to the 
meteorologist — is a fair allegory of our short- 
sighted American optimism. In a way it is 
true that our fields are being rendered fruitful 
by the blood which drenches Europe: market 
for our produce and manufactures (at least 
for so long as Europe is rich enough to wage 
war) is assured, and Old World gold streams in- 
to our coffers. But the American who sees in 
the war only this brief material gain must 
regard his countrymen as a nation of vampires 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

fattening on the blood of their kindred. We 
are not yet that. 

But what means the war, — what for us ? 
Time and events are disclosing. In the be- 
ginning, when the war was first forced upon 
unwilling peoples by the decision of kings, it 
seemed to us but the egotistic madness of 
ambitious monarchs eager to sear their names 
into the imaginations of posterity. As men 
more fully expressed their thought, in that 
great and strange apologetic literature which 
the war has called forth, we saw that, while 
indeed the monarchs had made the occasion 
and given the signal for war, the conflict itself 
is the expression of far more than the idio- 
syncrasies of royal personages. Week by week 
we have seen what first appeared to be a 
struggle precipitated by dynastic arrogance 
reveal itself as the struggle of discordant con- 
ceptions of human government. On the one 
hand, a mechanical imperialism, wonderful in 
capability and intelligence, asserting its right 
to rule as a kind of earthly providence; on the 
other, self-willed democracies, full of stupidity 
and contrariety, but full, too, of love of that 
liberty which to certain races of men has ever 
seemed dearer, even when it entails imper- 
fection, than can be the most benevolently 
softened servitude. Between these ideals it is 
for us, as Americans, no difficult matter to 
choose. We know them both in our own ex- 
perience, for no nation is consistently one 
thing or the other. We have much to shame 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

us and much to be proud of, in our conduct 
both as imperiaHsts and as democrats. But 
when we face the issue in its ideal form, and 
ask ourselves intimately which, in the long 
run, we would have our country be, imperial- 
istic or democratic, the spirit of our institu- 
tions and of our history gives us but one 
possible answer. 

But with the marshalling of our sympathies, 
spontaneous and inevitable according to our 
dispositions and antecedents, our concern with 
the war, as Americans, does not cease. As 
events unfold and the effects of the war are 
brought nearer to us, it becomes increasingly 
evident that the struggle in Europe has pre- 
cipitated in our midst issues that we must 
face. It is not enough to say that our institu- 
tions are democratic in spirit; we must yet 
answer, shall they continue to be so.^* The 
war has brought to our national consciousness 
perils and threats that we had never before 
realized, — the perils of internal disruption, 
owing to the conflicting ideals of our citizen- 
ship; threats of external aggression; for when 
we see war hurtled from the clear upon un- 
suspecting peoples, as was this war, we realize 
that no nation is secure from enemies because 
it is conscious of no enmity. 

These issues — the issue of the internal 
and the external perils — are issues which the 
young men and women of the entering genera- 
tion must solve. Of the two, the problem of 
meeting external peril, foreign aggression, is 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

the simpler of solution. It is a question of the 
minor sacrifice of money, time, and effort in 
the interest of military preparedness. As it 
affects students in the University, for example, 
it touches the matter of willingness to drill 
and of zeal in acquiring that modicum of mili- 
tary knowledge which the citizens of states 
which are to preserve their independence must 
possess. In a yet broader way, it touches the 
whole question of public support of a policy 
of national defence. There are at present two 
policies urged by our public men: the one, 
that we reject all armament and rely for our 
defence upon our virtuous consciousness of 
fostering ill-will toward none; the other, that 
we arm, not for wars of aggression, but for the 
preservation of our ideals on an earth which 
harbours nations whose political aims can 
thrive only in a policy of aggression. Between 
these policies we must choose. 

The internal peril is yet more searching and 
serious. It turns upon the question of love of 
country and loyalty to its ideals. The state- 
ment has come to my ears that many, very 
many, of our young men are saying that they 
would not go to war at the call of the United 
States no matter what the issue or what the 
danger, — that they value their personal 
safety more than the perpetuity of this or any 
other nation. I can hardly credit this, but if 
it be to any extent true we as a people are 
surely riding to a fall that will destroy us; 
and if it be true of the young men whom the 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

state is educating in free institutions, there 
can be no more damning mockery than is such 
state-education. Our country may, on occa- 
sion (for this, too, must be rare), have wel- 
comed to its privileges aliens who have ac- 
cepted its citizenship without giving it their 
allegiance; but surely the youth of such a land 
as ours are not being reared to betray it or in 
utter want of those ideals which have been 
the stay and inspiration of all greatly historic 
peoples. 

Yonder in Europe men have died and are 
dying by the thousand for beliefs that are 
dearer to them than life. And if we of the 
United States of America have no beliefs, no 
national ideals, which for their preservation 
could inspire a similar sacrifice, we are of all 
nations the poorest and most pitiable. 

September, 1915. 

VI 

THE ISSUE: UNITY, LAW, 
HUMANITY 

The United States is at last consciously at 
war with Germany. I say ' at last consciously,' 
for the conflict into which we now enter with 
opened eyes has been smoulderingly with us 
ever since the incident of Manila Bay. Not 
that that incident left any very grievous 
wound (it was passed off with a jest); but 
that it served as our first vague premonition 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

of the lurking hostility which Germany enter- 
tained for us, and of which the events that 
have crowded the past two and a half years 
have at last made us reluctantly conscious. 
Democracies are good-natured; they forgive 
easily and forget easily; democracies are also 
slow-witted, and above all blind to subtlety in 
politics. The United States has displayed all 
of these democratic traits in its relations with 
Germany. Feeling no ill-will, it suspected 
none. Indeed, the homage of unaffected and 
unstinted admiration which Americans ren- 
dered to German achievements in learning 
and industry made us almost impervious to 
any sense of injury, even in the presence of 
abuse. There is something altogether stupid 
and almost ludicrous in the slowness with 
which we have reacted to the series of insult- 
ing blows aimed at us, from the Lusitania to 
the diplomatically accredited spies and the 
Zimmermann note. But finally we have been 
made to understand that the injury is in- 
tended, and our resentment, slow to kindle, 
is burning deep. War is proclaimed, and a 
part of the smart of it is that we now see that 
Germany had counted on our slowness and 
discounted our effectiveness in waging it. 

Now that we are in the war, with awakened 
minds, it is our first duty to think clearly and 
to see clearly what we are fighting for. This 
is all the more a duty because of the duplicity 
with which the issue has been forced upon us 
and the dazed intelligence with which we have 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

met it. German diplomacy has been truly 
credited with a vast amount of psychological 
blundering, but in one important particular 
Germany's statesmen have counted with their 
hosts; they have seen that the public is more 
readily moved by passion than by reason and 
that rational inconsistency in the public mmd 
puts the people helplessly under the direction 
of designing leaders. This is to be seen in the 
manner in which they have marshalled the 
sentiment of their own people; for in spite of 
the diametrical opposition of the two aims 
the German nation has fought with equal 
enthusiasm for ' a place in the sun' by a burst- 
ing of 'the iron ring' (phrases which niean, 
in plain speech, territorial conquest) and for 
'national defence' from Pan-Slavic barbarism 
and Anglo-French greed. German statesmen 
understood that these various motives would 
move concertedly to military fervour; and 
they showed their contempt for their public 
in playing contradictory reasons to the arous- 
ing of one passion. In a similar manner, but 
for an opposite end, they have played upon 
the public mind of the United States. _ Ger- 
many has realized that the internal division of 
America is her best safety. She has therefore 
with a truly sardonic calculation, from ante- 
bellum days devoted a huge energy to securing 
a grip upon our domestic politics (marking 
us on her school-children's maps, Owen Wister 
tells us, as 'deutsche Gebiete,') while with an 
equal deliberation, wherever her interests 

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LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

seemed to demand it, she has inflicted upon us 
shame and injury. It can hardly be said that 
her policy has overreached, since it has taken 
more than two years to bring even the appear- 
ance of unity to the gap created. 

But that unity, if it is to amount to any- 
thing, must be one of understanding, not of 
feeling. The present state of the public mind 
is undoubtedly more emotional than rational, 
and while it is for the moment one, there is no 
assurance that this oneness of feeling can 
endure unless it be fortified by unity of in- 
telligent purpose. Americans must see the 
issue fundamentally, or the war will have been 
tragically disastrous to our self-respect. 

What is that issue.'' In too many m.en's 
minds it appears to be bound up with some 
idea of the rights of commerce — 'freedom of 
the seas, ' to use Germany's own phrase. Cer- 
tainly this is our immediate pretext, just as 
the rape of Belgium was Great Britain's and 
the murder at Sarajevo Germany's immediate 
pretext. The Sarajevo affair, long since proven 
to be but a hypocrite's cloak, has long ceased 
to move men; and the rape of Belgium, while 
its horror has grown rather than diminished 
with the passing of time, is now clearly under- 
stood to be the impulsive and not the full cause 
of Great Britain's entry into the war. In a 
similar manner, we of the United States must 
soon discover that the submarine phase of 
frightfulness is only a symptom of the evil 
we are combating. Back of it is a huger issue, 

226 



LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

the one which alone justifies our participation 
in the war. 

That issue has been named by President 
Wilson. We are to fight "for democracy, for 
the right of those who submit to authority 
to have a voice in their own government," a 
right "more precious than peace." And the 
enemy we are to fight is " Prussian autocracy. " 
Unerringly, the President is true in his judg- 
ment; he has named the issue at its core; but 
it would have been too much to expect, indeed 
it was hardly possible, that he should have 
made this issue perfectly intelligible. It is 
no easy problem to comprehend democratic 
ideals; and in such an opposition as 'democ- 
racy vs. autocracy,' it is easier to repeat the 
names than to define the antagonism meant. 
But if this be the issue of the war we are to 
fight, it is every man's first duty to probe to 
its depth. 

Fomally put, the issue at stake is respect 
for law. Respect for law is the bond and 
cement of democracy; in oligarchies and au- 
tocracies it is only an expedient for realizing 
the wills of oligarchs and autocrats. For the 
democrat, the law is sacred, since his state is 
destroyed without it; for the oligarch the law 
is but a written instrument, to be scrapped at 
will with the paper upon which it is written. 
The opposition was completely expressed cen- 
turies ago in the words of Demaratus to 
Xerxes: "Know, O King, that the Spartans 
have a master whom they fear more than your 

227 



LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

slaves fear you, and that master is the law." 
The harsh phrases of the German chancellor 
at the time of the invasion of Belgium still 
ring in men's ears: "Necessity knows no law. 
Our troops have occupied Luxemburg and 
have perhaps already entered Belgium. This 
is contrary to the dictates of international 
law." In these words Germany abjured faith 
in the great institution which has cost more 
and has meant more to mankind than any 
other, — the institution of that law which is 
the first condition of creative human activity 
and friendly co-operation of man with man. 
In succeeding acts Germany has emphasized 
her abjuration with violence upon violence, 
making of herself an outlaw nation, outlaw 
not only to the agreements of peace, but also 
to those laws of chivalry in warfare which 
represent so much that is noble in human prog- 
ress out of the dark ages. 

And here we come to the grim nub of con- 
tention. In destroying law, Germany has 
been assailing the best in humanity. Brute 
nature is a part of our human heritage; it 
responds to every freedom and strains every 
leash. What makes men of us, rather than 
beasts, is our power, by dint of reason, to 
impose law upon appetite and create char- 
acters which react to principle rather than 
desire. The best thing about man is that he 
is capable of dying for his self-imposed laws, 
and that he can prefer the honour and nobility 
of a true humanity to the slinking safety of an 

228 



LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC 

ignoble life. The 'right more precious than 
peace' is the finest and most saving of human 
possessions. That this possession is taken 
away by an attack upon the laws of nations, 
taken both from the nation and the individual, 
has received abundant illustration in the 
working out of the policy of 'f rightfulness.' 
It is Germany's deliberately politic inhuman- 
ity which makes her submarine campaign so 
vile, and it is her deliberate inhumanity which 
is the real enemy we are engaged against. 

In all this I agree with President Wilson 
that it is the German oligarchy and not the 
German people that we must make war upon. 
It is true that the German people have sup- 
ported the oligarchy, but it is even more true 
that they have been fearfully abused and de- 
ceived by this oligarchy. Indeed, it may be 
doubted if frightfulness has anywhere wrought 
a more hideous wrong than upon the German 
people themselves, using their emotions for 
its ends; and one may well believe that the 
oligarchs shudderingly dread the hour of self- 
revelation in Germany, and that they will use 
every power they can find to postpone its 
coming beyond their generation. Their motto 
to-day is surely, 'After us the deluge ! ' 

April, 1 91 7. 



229 



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